Since the loons are continuing to bay at the moon and insist Ron Paul really does have massive support (and I removed him from the poll because he was “winning” and I’m a neocon fascist Hitler) I spent more time on this than it’s worth and did some analysis of the vote records in our database—and there is ample evidence of cheating. There are repeated episodes of multiple votes in short timeframes from university networks, often the same university over and over, with about enough time between them to disconnect and refresh the IP address. There are also lots of votes from dialup accounts; the same dialup networks over and over, at intervals that are about right for hanging up and redialing to get a new IP address. And I can actually see the point at which the stacking began, when the votes for Ron Paul suddenly started piling up.

Is this proof of cheating? No, but I don’t have to prove it. It’s just a silly internet poll, and this tempest in a teapot shows how desperate the Paul campaign is to get noticed.

But at the risk of repeating myself, just because it’s an unscientific, unverifiable, ultimately meaningless internet poll, that doesn’t mean I’m going to stand by and watch as people blatantly stack the results.

Here’s an explanation of some of the methods used for Stacking Internet Polls.

The Ron Paul campaign, meanwhile, has shown that they don’t plan on doing the right thing by asking their followers not to cheat on internet polls. They’re getting so much publicity by acting like idiots and creating this weird facade of a campaign, who can blame them? Ron Paul Builds Campaign on the Web.

Meanwhile, the popular conservative blog Little Green Footballs on Wednesday took Paul’s name off the list of presidential candidates in its online poll because, it said, “his supporters are deliberately spamming our polls to make it appear as if Paul has more support than he does.”

That decision prompted more than two dozen angry emails - many obscene - from Paul supporters, the blog said Thursday. Little Green Footballs said that Paul backers had not voted multiple times, but had rather sent out emails and posted a link to the poll on their own websites, urging people to vote for Paul.

“You have to look at where the criticism is coming from. It’s a neo-con site,” said Paul spokesman Benton. “We’ve had a flood of response after the [9/11] comment, about 75 percent positive and 25 percent negative saying Ron is a disgrace and we should just keep bombing people.”