How Palin Conservatives Are Cheating The DWTS Voting System

By Tracie Egan Morrissey | November 16, 2010 | 6:21pm

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It’s been alleged that the Tea Party’s “Operation Bristol” is keeping the teen mom in the competition. However, the real conspiracy is that her conservative supporters have figured out a way to exploit ABC.com’s email-voting feature, allowing infinite votes.

While Bristol Palin denies any Tea Party conspiracy theories, there’s no denying that conservatives have been pushing for votes for Bristol, using blogs and Twitter to start a movement. But what isn’t widely known is the evidence—via message board comments on some conservative sites—that this mobilization involves fixing this (albeit meaningless) election through a technical snafu on ABC’s website, which allows Palin’s supporters to cast an infinite number of email votes:

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Here’s a hint: They don’t have to be VALID email addresses to register them with ABC.com, there is apparently no validation process. The just have to be formatted like a valid email address, and you must use a valid zip code and a birthdate that makes you old enough to vote. I’m voting like a democrat, all night long…

No, it doesn’t have to be a valid email address – I had one of my anonymous ones [email protected] that I used, and then just did the sign-up process all over again with [email protected] and it worked.

Got my 80 votes in online…took 2 hours. I am beat

I only got 42 in, I have some catching up to do!

Lord have mercy, I voted for 3 hours online! I got 300 in.

It seems like it’s working! Early predictions about the votes indicate that Bristol is the safest bet to stay in the competition this evening. Sure, it may seem like just a group of overzealous fans, but their larger message is not about an enthusiasm for teen activism or ballroom dancing, but rather, is a way to show the left that the Tea Party is a force to be reckoned with. One site wants to “make liberal heads explode” by urging Tea Partiers to vote for Palin, even saying that they “don’t need to watch” DWTS as long as they vote.

You may not be a fan of the show or even Bristol but I firmly believe her continued success on the show demonstrates the power of the tea party.

However, not all conservatives are moved toward supporting Bristol. One commenter thinks there are more important matters at hand:

I will not vote for that tacky bit of TV trash. She should be home taking care of the baby and trying to find a good husband.

Another site somewhat acknowledges that repeat voting is an abhorrent quality exhibited by Democrats in “real” elections, which is all the more reason why Republicans should utilize this feature with DWTS:

[T]he fact we’ve been all doing this for Bristol has been driving the Left NUTS…For conservatives, enjoy the fun of finally, at last, getting a taste of what it’s like to be a Democrat. You can vote as much as you want. You can vote using all sorts of names. You can vote all day. You can’t get paid to vote, because you aren’t really a Democrat, silly, but you can get as close as you can possibly get without being in a union or taking part in ACORN.

While yet another site admits that Bristol’s success on DWTS is the right’s way to get back at the left for unfairly giving Tina Fey a Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. (Apparently, there are still some hard feelings over Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin.)

So, yeah, at least part of Bristol Palin’s success on Dancing With the Stars is political. But don’t ever tell me that the other side doesn’t do this too. And don’t complain because our side is doing it back.

I, for one, am not complaining. As someone who will pretty much watch anything on television, I find this show boring and frankly not up to my standards, which is weird because my bar and brow are both set very low when it comes to pop culture. Actually, I enjoy a Sanjaya-esque shit show in instances like these, in which I’m not the least bit invested. What’s more troubling to me is that the Tea Party is at least right in its assertion of how powerful it can be—its votes can help a person without merit win a race. Thankfully, our government doesn’t have an email voting system that can easily be manipulated. However, that didn’t seem to matter a few weeks ago during the midterm elections.

Anyway, here’s Bristol on last night’s show. First she did a rather Stevie Nicks-ish, witch-y woman paso doble.

And then her “Passion of the Christ”-inspired waltz.

Also, Bristol is not trash. She’s basically “a golden child,” although she did have some imperfection inside her. And his name was Levi.