During the last election, it became a running joke at LGF that Ron Paul’s odd supporters would spam and skew and vote repeatedly in every Internet poll they could find, trying to boost the Crazy Uncle’s apparent popularity.

This measure of popularity is completely bogus, of course, because it’s trivially easy to vote more than once in a silly non-scientific Internet poll; usually, all you have to do is clear your browser’s cookies and bam! you can vote as many times as you can stand clicking a button. And Paulians have a level of button-clicking persistence that dwarfs the capabilities of sane people.

Well, following Monday night’s Republican debate, the Ron Paul robot army immediately launched campaigns to spam every poll they could find, because it was so incredibly successful for them in the last go-round.

The funniest post on this subject at a Ron Paul website is here: CNN Reports Ron Paul At 0% While CNN Online Poll Shows Him At 75% « RunRonPaul.com.

Blogger Trevor Lyman was outraged — outraged, I say! — because a silly Internet poll at National Journal showed Ron Paul with zero percent of the votes:

While the online poll conducted by CNN shows Ron Paul as the clear winner with 75% of the votes, CNN reporters pull a fast one by citing a lesser known poll hosted at National Journal claiming Ron Paul came in at 0%.

CNN discards their own poll in favor of another poll that shows results more to their liking.

This is overt propaganda.

But not to worry — as soon as he posted this, Paulians sprang into action:

The National Journal poll cited by CNN now shows Ron Paul in the lead with 33% of the vote.

Voila! Ron Paul is now the clear winner!

Here’s another Paulian website that provides a list of Internet polls (mixed in with ads for quack thyroid medications and crazy rants about radiation), and hey! There’s LGF! But wait, something must have gone wrong — because the landslide winner of LGF’s poll is: Barack Obama. How did that happen?

There’s no trickery involved here; LGF’s polling code uses IP addresses instead of cookies, which makes it much more difficult for the Paulians to scam. They still managed to artificially inflate their idol’s numbers, but were prevented from driving him into the lead.

Here’s another Paulian site with a list of polls: Godlike Productions: support RON PAUL vote in the DEBATE POLLS.

This one advertises itself with the slogan, “UFOs, Conspiracy Theorists, Lunatic Fringe.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.