$$$ for WPI vote daily now in Vivint Round 2!

[shannah]

Thanks NPG. I'll watch for them.

 

[frenchtulip]

I wonder if some of the contests would consider prohibiting religion-based schools or organizations from participating in their competitions. Lots of health-related organizations were winning big in the Pepsi contest, and I noticed Pepsi eliminated the health category, at least for 2011. The Jewish-based schools that placed in the top 15 (or won $25K) in the Chase contest will not be able to participate in that contest again. Nor will the WPI. I don't know much about the Kohl contest, other than the fact a lot of Jewish schools (mostly Chabad-related) won millions. Contest sponsors certainly don't want to offend any one religious group, but if they understood how much that one group is winning in these contests, they might see the unfairness and prohibit religion-based groups from participating. They might think this is not fair to other religion-based groups, but then again, Pepsi had no problem with eliminating the health category this year.

 

[helen41]

Now I'm REALLY angry
There was a response to my post on the Conejo wall "Shalom Aleichem
Hi Helen, just noticed your comment. I am certainly not paying anybody to vote, only encouraging my own social network of friends to vote. Many have voted, but are reluctant to vote daily so it is a challenge. I checked the link you provided and clicking on the links it is plain that the buttons to not actually lead to the voting page at all. If you see any vote marketing going on by any charity that is against the rules I would recommend you let Vivint know and they will handle it.
35 minutes ago Like
Helen Watkinson When I said "you", I meant your group, not you personally. Vivint was made aware and I was told they were sending you an email about it 2 days ago. That link was working 3 hours ago when I took screenshots.

 

[helen41]

Now I'm REALLY angry
There was a response to my post on the Conejo wall "Shalom Aleichem
Hi Helen, just noticed your comment. I am certainly not paying anybody to vote, only encouraging my own social network of friends to vote. Many have voted, but are reluctant to vote daily so it is a challenge. I checked the link you provided and clicking on the links it is plain that the buttons to not actually lead to the voting page at all. If you see any vote marketing going on by any charity that is against the rules I would recommend you let Vivint know and they will handle it.
35 minutes ago Like
Helen Watkinson When I said "you", I meant your group, not you personally. Vivint was made aware and I was told they were sending you an email about it 2 days ago. That link was working 3 hours ago when I took screenshots.

and now I get this Shalom Aleichem "What I'm saying is that the initial link to the blog page you sent me does work, but the buttons that you see on the page have been disabled and it does not work at all. So it is essentially a screenshot of disabled offer as per the rules. Let's focus on the legitimate ways of publicizing our causes. Thank you for let me know about the link. As you said it looks like Vivint has already contacted FC about it."
50 minutes ago Like

this was my response "I'm glad it is disabled now. It was working fine this morning."
Words fail me, at least words I am willing to type

 

[No Poster Girl]

I received this email from Vivint just now, in response to the boatload o' links & info I sent them:

"Hello Jocelyn!

Thank you for this information. I will begin looking into this right now. Information like this helps us to successfully maintain the integrity of the Vivint Gives Back Project.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Thanks so much!"

So we'll see if this does anything.

 

[Nielk]

Helen & No Poster Girl thank you for all the work you are putting into this. I know it must be hard being so sick and dealing with
this.
Much appreciated,
Nielk

 

[eric_s]

Since Special K's last vote count, that was taken around 21 hours ago, Conejo has "only" added around 700 votes. And i can't remember correctly, but i think around 10 hours ago they had more than they have now, but i'm not sure about that. So it seems the conejo (it means rabbit) has slowed down a bit. Good job everyboy...
Like this we can keep them in check and i would guess a good number of these 700 votes were not legitimate, so if they will now play fair they might not be able to keep this up.

Let's stay on the lookout for any new dishonest stuff and document everything. And if i have some time i will look into how one can file a complaint to the regulatory body for 501(c)(3)s. Just in case we might need this one day...

 

[Tuha]

do you mean eric that vivint took some votes away from Conejo? if I understood corectly, I dont think so. I am wondering if vivint will do it at all.
What is positive that from the last update WPI got around 80 more votes than Conejo

 

[eric_s]

I'm not sure, but i thought this afternoon Conejo was somewhere around 12'500. But i might be wrong, i didn't write it down or anything like that. Either way, something has changed, they don't get so many votes anymore, and their vote buying links (or at least some of them) are now deactivated. So it seems to be clear where these votes came from. But i would not be surprised if they look for other ways to compensate voters.

Edit: In the last hour, they got around 30 votes. And now it's afternoon in the USA. I suspect they will get less votes during the night, so it should be less than 700 per day. But we need to stay vigilant and also try to get new voters ourselves.

 

[Tuha]

I often checked their numbers during this day but I think Conejo didnt have 12500 votes. The next days will show us how it will continue.
but I think some individums are able to do everything for their succes. and then we have still here these invisible children...

 

[Nielk]

I don't think we need to worry about them anymore.

 

[eric_s]

I'm not too sure, Neil, they are still going at an increased pace, as compared to before the spike. Lower than 2000 per day, though. And i think they will try anything, unfortunately.

 

[No Poster Girl]

Here's my blog post: Paying for Votes in Vivint Gives Back

The short url is http://wp.me/p1j3vO-dg

My husband twisted my arm to leave the word "cheating" out of the title. I argued that googling "chase giving cheating" was how many people got to my Chase entries, but he countered that he would like to live the rest of his life not having to deal with any more lawyers than necessary. I see his point.

 

[SpecialK82]

Hey guys - you are doing a great job keeping on top of Conejo and notifying Vivint, I'm glad they are so interested!! Please, please do not jeopardize your health working on this, I know it is stressful and infuriating for many of us :headache: but remember to take care of yourself first so you don't have too much time like this :In bed: second.

The figures today are surprising, Conejo had 840 which is somewhat good news given the last few days, but WPI only had a handful more at 877!!

I don't know what happened to our voters, and it's not like they voted Canada because they are low today also at 141. Hmmm....

WPI 30699 + 877 = 31576
Be Perfect 10360 + 190 = 10550
Conejo 11557 + 840 = 12397
Surfer Healing 7025 + 98 = 7123
Hailey mayz 4836 + 93 = 4929
Next Gen 3819 + 15 = 3834
Invisible 3665 + 38 = 3703
Jumpstart 3570 + 51 = 3621
King Bellflower 3358 + 57 = 3415
Sean Vernon 2404 + 48 = 2452
Patner Living 1950 + 27 = 1977
Shared Hope 2010 + 40 = 2050
Austin's House 1850 + 49 = 1899
Trevor 1025 + 5 = 1030
Dream 949 + 19 = 968
Courage 1227 + 21 = 1248
Ameriface 1048 + 24 = 1072
Prader Willi CA 497 + 5 = 502
Gets Better 3467 + 193 = 3660
Tinnitus 193 + 4 = 197


Light & Love 17374 + 473 = 17847
St John Hospital 7728 + 154 = 7882
ME/FM Action 4206 + 141 = 4347
Prader-Willi 3733 + 134 = 3867

 

[helen41]

your post brought tears to my eyes. You did a fantastic job, and there can be no question in the mind of the reader as to what is going on. My concern is this. People have to find and come to your blog to read it.
It's been over 48 hours since we reported this, and I don't see votes being removed from Conejo. I am concerned they won't be without some public outcry. Would you be agreeable to having someone post the link to your blog on the Vivint page? That opens the door to comments and a bit of pressure to remove those votes.
That person probably shouldn't be me, but if you are agreeable, I think it would be helpful
So very, very well done

 

[helen41]

@specialK, I did read 2 comments today from people saying they would continue to vote, but they were now sure we couldn't win. I wonder if it is a response to this whole paying for votes fiasco, and that people are just feeling demoralized.
That makes me want to fight harder, and I think we have to try to galvanize our voters to stand up for what is right
We can fight back, and I believe we can win. We have the data

 

[eric_s]

There is absolutely no reason to now stop voting for the WPI. Much to the contrary. Also no reason to believe we can't win. It only took us a couple of hours to find out what's going on and also we already seem to see the success of our intervention. It's now clear these were not legitimate votes, so we know they are actually weaker than our community. Our competitors would not have to resort that sort of low tactics if they thought they could win fairly. This is the best sign that we are absolutely able to win this contest. We are already back on track and extending our lead again. They had more votes than us for 2 days, after we had led for over a month. Let's continue to vote and bring in new voters and win this contest.

 

[justinreilly]

Thanks to everyone who has been involved getting votes for WPI!

Someone asked me to look into these irregularities in voting. Here is my post on Jocelyn's blog:

Jocelyn,
Thanks for your work looking into this. someone asked me to look into this since i am a (nonpracticing) lawyer. I would like to help but I haven't been following the contest so i would need people like you to do the heavylifting (which you've done most of). I strongly suggest you contact Vivint and ask them to clamp down on Conejo for this cheating (you can use this word!). Also i suggest you contact the other top contenders in the region and ask them to contact Vivint. Plus contact Conejo themselves. Either you can draft text and i will edit it and send it to them under our join signature or you can send a note yourself and If they don't respond quickly and satisfactorily, I can send them a letter. Please keep us on MECFSforums.com and PR up to date on this. You can contact me under my name at these forums. I know this is more work, but let's see this thru and make sure WPI wins big!

Thanks,
Justin

 

[eric_s]

Some good news. Since i last checked Conejo's vote count (at around 3 CEST, that's 9 pm EDT) they didn't even make 200 votes. In 7 hours. So there's clearly a change. And since Special K's report, which was around 9 hours ago, there was an increase of 233 votes.

If they have some sort of "auto-voting" going on, it's at least not so massive we couldn't beat it.

I will now check what they get in the following hour, from 4:15 EDT to 5:15 EDT.

 

[justinreilly]

Hi Justin. Is is the IRS that is regulating 501 (c)(3)s? If you could look into this, once you have a little bit of time and spare energy, that would be great.

Before I look into it, tell me some more about what you plan to do and why. You want to hold that over their heads to get them to stop or do you want to pursue this regardless of the contest outcome (that last one would seem inefficient imo). I think it would be good to threaten 'the Rabbit' with filing a complaint with IRS and FCC (federal commerce commission) without researching the specifics since this will take some energy.

IRS decides whether you can be exempt from taxes under section 501 of the Internal Revenue Code. You can operate a non-profit or public interest group without dealing with IRS (other than paying taxes of course) but if you want to not pay taxes you have to file and comply under section 501. So if they are violating the requirements of section 501 then IRS could make them pay taxes which would be a huge problem for an entity of course. IRS would I assume be receptive to meritorious complaints about 501 violations since it would increase their revenues. Don't know if cheating in a contest would necessarily disqualify them though. You can google section 501 and see what the requirements are. Nolo.com has good info on non-profit law.

I would think that a non-profit would be regulated by the same bodies as a for profit would- state and federal commerce commissions. I would guess that this would not be something that they would want to pursue, since the org being injured (WPI) is not the one giving out the money, but I don't know.