We reported yesterday that a fan of Todd Barry’s, a software developer, had rigged up his computer to vote for Barry 60-90 times every minute in the Comedy Central Stand-up Showdown. Barry was ranked first in the contest yesterday. Today, however, things have changed. Comedian Lisa Landry is enjoying the number one spot. However, where the total number of votes were listed for each comedian yesterday and all the days before that, there is no tally. You can check it out here.

The Barry fan said this in a comment on Punchline Magazine’s blog page:

I’ve stopped my auto-voting program. Of course I’m a huge Todd Barry fan (as well as several others on the list). It was just done as a joke – I have no emotional investment in seeing my favorite comedians win – it was just good fun.

It just illustrates how meaningless online voting is and how it’s very easy to rig. I also don’t see much of a difference between that and just repeatedly voting “by hand”. All I did was automate the process everyone has available – clicking hyperlinks. It just so happens that Comedy Central’s mechanism for preventing more than one vote a minute is weak. Even without automating the process, if a user clears their cookies between votes, they could vote more than once per minute.

You can still vote at the official Showdown page. In the end, the 20 highest ranked comedians will have their special replayed on Comedy Central during the showdown day, which is Jan 31.