Rigged results

• Source: Global Times
• [23:15 July 02 2009]
• Comments

Text message vote rigging for China’s versions of American Idol-like contests is an open secret.

By Guo Lu

Along with the popularity of online and text message voting for contestants on China’s versions of American Idol, Super Girl, and its imitators Happy Girl and Happy Boy, have come companies that design and sell vote rigging software that allows an individual deliver as many as 10,000 votes at once. And while it’s unfair, buying the votes is currently perfectly legal.

Just ask Wang Yao. She was among the top 10 finishers in an online competition that ended June 16 to be a “Lavender Angel” in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province promoting a 200,000-square meter lavender field for 20,000 yuan ($2,930) a week for three months.

Wang told the Global Times, “I received calls from a vote cheating company several times, they told me that they could make me the winner in the online voting if I paid them. The price was one yuan (15 cents) per vote. If I paid more, they could also offer me a discount of 0.5 yuan (7 cents) for 10,000 times.”
 
A saleswoman surnamed Huang from a Guangxi-based voting company, the Piao Wang, or “ticket king,” (www.2008vote.cn), told the Global Times the company can also customize its vote rigging software to work with different balloting methods.

“Generally, we have three types of voting tools based on different kinds of voting. For online voting, you only have to show us the website and the person for whom you want to vote. The basic price is 0.5 yuan for every text message vote, and 300 yuan for 10,000 online votes,” Huang said.

Meanwhile, customized vote cheating software also can be designed, she said.

“We can design professional software for whatever voting game you want, and the prices can be negotiated. The price can vary depending on the difficulty of the online voting system – from 850 yuan ($124) to 3,000 yuan ($440).”

She said the vote cheating software was reliable and that her company’s services were confidential. “We won’t vote all at once so that it looks abnormal and we don’t reveal details about our clients.”

Huang said the company was established three years ago, and worked in several well-known national massive voting competitions, including Super Girl and Happy Boy in 2006.

Super Girl vote rigging was an open secret, according to an April 24, 2007 report from the World Exclusive, a Chinese financial magazine.

“The vote cheating in Super Girl ran through the whole competition period and give birth to many voting companies,” said the magazine.

The magazine quoted an anonymous vote rigging company manager who listed the prices to be a Super Girl finalist. “You could pay 30,000 yuan ($4,400) to be in the top 20, or 200,000 yuan ($29,270) to be in the top 10, or 3 million yuan ($440,000 to be the champion,” he claimed.

Piao Wang isn’t by any means the only vote rigging company in China. A large number of companies can be found via the Baidu and Google search engines.