June 16, 2002
YOU MAY WANT TO VOTE in this poll on the official Taliban website, which is still in business.
UPDATE: Reader John Beckwith writes:
I followed your link and tried to vote in the Taliban poll. I submitted my vote, but the poll results page informed me that my vote would not be tallied because I had already voted.
I am not sure, but they may have set things up to allow only one person who linked in from Instapundit to vote. If so, the Taliban are smarter than CAIR.
I will be curious to know if other voters have a similar experience.
Hmm. Tricky. You can always type the address into your browser:
http://www.talibanonline.net/index.asp
Of course, this is an admission of their cause’s unpopularity. They can’t even stuff their own internet poll
UPDATE: Several readers report that votes don’t seem to be changing the totals. It’s probably a fake poll.
Reverend Touchy says:
Every time comments are opened up, it’s to a story I have nothing to comment on…
Why not open the floodgates on every story? We need more slashdot style discussion!
RT
June 16, 2002, 5:09 pmMeryl Yourish says:
Okay, everybody: Right-click your mouse. Select “copy shortcut” from your menu in IE. Select “copy link location” from your menu in Netscape. Go to the location bar, control-v or edit/copy, and then go vote.
Allah is winning, 1628 to 1025 at the moment, with 39 people who can’t decide. It’s 5:18 p.m., EST.
Have fun, kids!
June 16, 2002, 5:13 pmMeryl Yourish says:
Paste. Edit/paste. Sorry.
June 16, 2002, 5:15 pmCGage says:
Update:
5:54 edt: 1629 say the islamofascists will kick butt, 1137 say no way, 40 still haven’t bought that clue, yet.
In the last forty minutes, the West got 112 votes to 1 for the other side. Seems kinda wussy for the legendary Instapundit Hitmeister. Still, its worth saying “behold, the power of Instapundit.”
June 16, 2002, 5:58 pmDave says:
*None* of the above worked for me. I even opened a new window. Each time I wasn’t allowed to vote.
June 16, 2002, 6:24 pmLofty says:
The link worked just fine for me. Too bad Allah is still winning. It’s curious that the Taliban would have a democratic vote for something as important to their cause as their very existance. Hmmm….
June 16, 2002, 6:36 pmbob says:
Oh, this is rich…
“Jazakallah Khairun. Your Vote is really very valuable for us to judge what our visiters think about the Taliban.Thank you”
Your vote is really very valuable. I’m sure it is. As soon as I saw that, I thought “uh oh, maybe it’s my IP address that is very valuable.” I hope I haven’t just done something very stupid indeed.
June 16, 2002, 7:16 pmCharles Johnson says:
I got in there earlier from Glenn’s link and it worked fine. Being the honest sort I am, I only voted once, of course, and I would never advocate that anyone do anything else.
But that music! Gaah! Get … it … out of my head!
June 16, 2002, 8:03 pmSKBubba says:
I think Bob is on the money. Either the Taliban is collecting IP addresses of the ‘no’ infidels, or Carnivore is tracking clicks on the ‘yes’ option, or both. Oops, gotta run. I hear the black helicopters and I can’t find my aluminum foil hat.
June 16, 2002, 8:41 pmHoward Owens says:
The vote, I’m sure, checks for IP addresses. I can’t vote again with either IE or Netscape.
Many people who can’t vote today probably can’t vote because they voted in this poll a month or so ago (as I did), because Glenn linked to this poll previously (I sent him the link).
Even so, many votes against Allah have been cast … the No’s now stand at 1355, with Yes at 1634 and don’t know at 44 — 6:55 p.m. PDT.
June 16, 2002, 9:53 pmJohn Beckwith says:
I could not vote using any method described here and I did not vote previously on this site. I’m not technical enough to figure this out, so I’ll chalk it up to the vagaries of the Internet and take back my comment that Taliban might be smarter than CAIR.
June 16, 2002, 10:46 pmBasilisk says:
1636 to 1455 still favoring the Taliban Victory by the Grace of Allah. Of course, this presupposes that Allah actually favors the Taliban. They seem to be coming up short with miracles, so either Allah is sitting this one out, or perhaps he prefers to shed his grace on the U.S.
June 17, 2002, 2:03 amDan Hartung says:
It is very unlikely that they are limiting votes based on the referrer (i.e. where you came to the site from). In any case, the voting is handled offsite by Sparklit.com — and the referrer to that site would be talibanonline.net, not instapundit.com. Sparklit creates a cookie when you vote, which should prevent you from recording a vote again. When I tried voting again, it told me I had already voted, but after deleting the cookie, it told me the same thing. This suggests it is not asking your browser to tell it anything, but is simply denying based on IP address. There is nothing special about the code on the page.
If you are being told you already voted and you did NOT, it is likely that another user of your ISP has already voted when using the same dynamic IP address.
Also, if they have experienced multiple vote attempts from the same IP block (256, or even 65536 IP addresses, assigned to the same ISP), their software may have blocked the entire block as a means to prevent someone from voting twice just by logging off and back onto the internet. The same technique is used at many message boards to ban “problem” users.
Oh, and Touchy: Not to speak for the Prof, but he’s previously stated that he doesn’t want to have to police every single comment on every single post. It’s only the ones for which he wants feedback. It’s his blog, after all! If you feel the need to comment, you can always start your own … half of us posting in this thread already have blogs.
June 17, 2002, 2:23 amMaria says:
Site is Good. They looks nice guys
June 17, 2002, 3:09 amThe Dodd says:
“Democratic” polling is certainly a strange hobby for these people, but am I the only one who finds it extremely odd that a bunch of back-to-the-14th-Century Islamofascists have a web page in the first place? Something smells funny about this….
June 17, 2002, 4:45 pmMaria says:
That site pretyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
June 18, 2002, 2:35 am