Pens And Habs Fans Wage A Cyberspace Battle

Due to an NHL website security meltdown, the league is at the centre of a cyberspace battle that rages between fans of the Pittsburgh Penguins and Montreal Canadiens.

The league’s All Star voting process has been tainted by fans and blog sites alike, to stuff the ballot box by any means necessary.

In a Nov. 11 home game against the Ottawa Senators, it was reported that the Canadiens heavily promoted all star voting during the game. One day ahead of the official start of voting.

When early results were tabulated, it was unusual to see all six Eastern Conference starters from the Canadiens

After these results, rumours surfaced that there was ballet box stuffing going on in Montreal.

Various news agencies investigated why the totals were so disparagingly high for Canadiens’ players while other notable stars such as Sidney Crosby, Evgeny Malkin and Alexander Ovechkin were far off in the distance.

So, why were the votes so highly in favour of Les Glorieux?

Along with legitimate votes, a user on a Canadiens fans site urged people to vote using an automated program called Greasemonkey (a Firefox extension that allows the user to take control of a specific website browser). The program allows users to vote over and over again and this would explain why all six starters, at one point, were all Habs.

According to NHL voting rules, fans are allowed to vote, via internet and text messaging, as many times as they like but are prohibited from using automated voting machines.

“Use of automatic voting methods is prohibited,” says the NHL website. “The NHL will have in place monitoring procedures designed to prevent individuals from unfairly influencing the outcome of the voting by generating significant blocks of votes using technical enhancements.”

The NHL moved quickly on this and eliminated thousands of votes from Canadiens’ players, including 20,000 from Alexei Kovalev alone. The NHL took preventative measures and now the league claims that every real time vote you see has been cast by a real person.

Against the overwhelming number of votes, illegal or otherwise, going Montreal’s way, a popular Penguins blog site decided to do something about it.

On Dec. 10 fans were encouraged to vote and get Crosby and Malkin ahead of Kovalev and Canadiens captain Saku Koivu.

Whether this message had any effect on the vote standings is impossible to say but as of Dec. 25, Crosby and Malkin lead the Eastern Conference in voting, ahead of Kovalev and Koivu.

So far no rumuors of automated programs have surfaced from Pittsburgh.

Currently, Kovalev is third in voting; approximately 480,000 votes ahead of sixth-place Ovechkin, which brings another interesting facet to this debate.

The Penguins have entered into a relationship with the Washington Capitals to further drive this voting war.

The collective effort is called the “Unholy Alliance” and they have made it clear what their intentions are.

“This one time only would bring Pens/Caps fans together to try and stun the world and get A.O. (Alexander Ovechkin) into the top three of the All Star voting,” said the Pens blog site.

“Yes, A.O. is a jackoff, but a Sid-Malkin-A.O. line in the All Star game would be a lot of fun on almost every level. Not to mention it would completely humiliate Habs fans.”

This isn’t the first time that ballot stuffing and agenda driven results have been effective.

Two years ago, 22-year-old Steve Schmid thought it would be a great idea to vote a hard-working, journeyman into the all star game. He chose Vancouver Canucks’ defenceman Rory Fitzpatrick. The “Vote for Rory” phenomenon was born.

Media outlets picked up on this and a few weeks later Canucks’ players were wearing “Vote for Rory” T-shirts. Rory’s supporters started promoting him with video montages on You Tube and soon after he was written about in publications like Sports Illustrated and the New York Times.

At that time, Fitzpatrick had nine NHL goals in his career. He had spent a month on the sidelines with a broken ankle and his name was nowhere to be found on any official NHL ballots.

On the strength of Schmid’s campaign, Fitzpatrick rose through the ranks to third in the Western Conference. He finished behind Nicklas Lidstrom and Scott Neidermayer.

To his credit Fitzpatrick backed out and never played in the 2007 All Star game in Dallas, Texas.

Any way you look at it the NHL has created a fair amount of publicity for itself. Although it’s hard to say if they wanted it through illegal voting. Judging by the desperate straits the league is in, they may take publicity any way they can get it.