At 8.30am yesterday morning the results of the poll we have been running on the lithgow-info.com website stood at 73 against fluoridation and 31 votes for fluoridation.
I watched in amazement yesterday between the hours of 9.32am and 17:26pm whilst the poll completely turned around after a radio interview I did with ABC. By 17:26pm yesterday afternoon the results of the poll stood at 91 votes against and 147 for flouridation. Looking at the visitor statistics of the site I noticed that the site had in fact only had 22 visitors.
To me this looked to be very odd. On examining the server logs to verify raw data for the site I found that between the hours of 9.32am and 17:26pm one IP 203.32.142.5 had constantly been hitting the poll.
This IP belongs to "Australia Parramatta Western Sydney Area Health Service". Another IP 203.21.192.1 turned out to be "Australia Lismore Northern Health Computer Service".
It really makes one wonder why "Western Sydney Area Health Service" and "Australia Lismore Northern Health Computer Service" felt it necessary to load the poll with 116 votes in favour of Fluoridation between them? Especially considering that the Lithgow Council Public Meeting was to be held that night. Were they worried that the poll was not going in their favour?
I mentioned this at the public meeting and was told that all employees have the same IP address in the department and that many employees could have voted.
This poll is designed to only allow 1 vote per IP address per day. The log shows that the site was continually hit by the IP 203.32.142.5 sometimes 100th of a second apart and then less than a minute apart contantly for an hour, break of 10 to 15 minutes then the pattern repeats. Either this has to be a very coordinated effort in the Department or a particular employee had so much time on their hands yesterday they just sat there continually exploiting the page between 9.32am and 17:26pm.
All I can say is, no wonder our Health Service is in such a state, when employees can spend all day trying to rig a harmless poll on a private web site. Just as well I have kept all the server logs.
After discovering all this, I thought I would take a closer look at the 31 votes for fluoridation before 8.30am yesterday. Guess what I found 20 votes for the same IPs from between the 26th October and the 9th November 2007.
Gosh, I wonder if it was the same employee? Let me know what you think !
Debra Morris
PS: If the possible implications of exploiting the web site were not so serious, I would have to smile :-)