Questions and Answers about Technical Problems concerning The Critters Readers Poll

• I tried to vote, but I got an error.

  If this happens, please contact us at http://critters.org/predpoll/error.cgi.

• My whole family wants to vote, but we have only one email address.

  If this happens, email your votes to our editor. He will hold your votes until the end of the poll and assure that those are counted. Be sure to mention whether any of your votes were accepted by our voting form. If so, please do not submit that person's votes in the email to the editor. Alternately, you might want to sign up for a free email account from one of the free email providers such as Hotmail.

• The nominee I want to vote for is listed two or more times in the same category.

  Regardless of which entry you choose, your vote will be counted. We will match up the various entries so that all votes are properly and accurately counted. We recognize that some votes have been entered incorrectly, but to correct all the small errors as they occur would force us to interrupt the voting too often.

• The nominee I want to vote for is listed in the wrong category.

  Go ahead and enter the nominee in the correct category if not listed already. When you do, that will automatically register as your vote in addition to giving everyone after you the correct voting entry to use. We will match up the various entries so that all votes are properly and accurately counted. We recognize that some votes have been entered incorrectly, but to correct all the small errors as they occur is impractical.

• The nominee I want to vote for is not listed.

  Go ahead and enter the nominee in the correct category. When you do, that will automatically register as your vote in addition to giving everyone after you the correct voting entry to use.

• I don't know the correct spelling, title, or address of the nominee I want to vote for.

  Go ahead and enter the nominee in the correct category to the best of your knowledge. We'll figure it out somehow. When you do, that will automatically register as your vote in addition to giving everyone after you the correct voting entry to use. Often, another voter seeing the incomplete entry will notify us of the missing information. We'll then keep that on file.

• My vote didn't show up later as a new nomination when I checked back.

  Sometimes the number of votes being handled by the program causes a delay. One entry in 1999 took 3 days to show up. So far, we're unaware of any votes being lost. If you feel your vote was lost, contact our editor at the above email address.

• Why is some other entry receiving so many votes? Is there cheating going on? Can you stop it?

  Our experience with this poll is that voters tend to learn of the poll at the sites they frequent. Consequently, they tend to show up in groups shortly after a notice is posted on that other site that the poll is underway. We don't consider that cheating.

  There have been some crude attempts, but those were easily spotted and dealt with. Additionally, the software is geared toward spotting such attempts. However, we'll not discuss what measures the software takes for obvious reasons but we do disqualify some votes when large voting blocks are encountered that are outside the normal limits we expect to see based on over a decade of operations.

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