Imagine this scenario: You’re a finalist in the Butterfinger video contest.  You now have a one in four chance of winning ten thousand dollars. All you have to do to get the money is to get the most votes in the competition. To vote for videos on the butterfinger site, all you have to do is open a yahoo account. Now, imagine that you are just 200 or so votes away from winning the ten grand. How tempted would you be to take a day off work and do nothing but register and vote for your own video all day long?

Voting ended yesterday in the “Nobody’s gonna lay a finger on my Butterfinger” video contest and even though the vote counts of all the finalists are right there on the website for the world to see, no winner has been announced yet. The Butterfinger site says they are “tallying” the votes and a winner will be announced on October 1st.

What the heck is there to tally? The winner of the contest was supposed to be determined by a public vote. The votes are in and one video clearly has the most votes. Here’s the final results of the butterfinger contest:

I have a feeling that by “tallying” Butterfinger really means “checking for vote fraud.” I’ve been checking in on the voting in the last few days and it seemed really suspicious. Why did 2 videos peak at 9210 and 8046 votes while two other videos both made it past 12,000 votes? Is it because they are way more hilarious than the other videos? Not really. All four videos are pretty much equal in quality though I guess my personal choice would be “Robochop.” But according to the votes, the winning video is Butterfinger Phone App by David Markus.

First place. Prize: $10,000

As I said, I kept checking on the voting during the final days. As it got down to the wire, the number of votes coming in really seemed to jump. The top 2 videos were gaining hundreds of votes a day. Was some kind of advertising done to draw more people to the butterfinger site in the last days of the contest? Or maybe the people who made those top 2 videos remembered they had hundreds of friends and family members they hadn’t asked to vote yet?

During the final two days of the contest, the vote counts of the top two videos both were going up so steadily that it did seem like maybe 2 people (or two teams of people) were racing each other to the finish line.  Maybe the reason the bottom two videos didn’t make it past 10,000 votes is because the people who made them saw that something fishy was going on and decided not to even bother after a certain point.  So in the end, the “winner” was whoever had the willpower to crank out the most votes for themselves.  This kind of vote fraud would be easy to prove if yahoo kept tabs of the IP addresses where the votes came from. I guess we’ll find out if they did that if they final scores have been adjusted when the winner is announced on October 1st.