South Poll

It’s been a while since my last post, I know. Plenty has happened since the last time I posted here: The Beijing Olympics began, The Beijing Olympics began to rock, I turned 22, the Reds traded away my second favorite player in 11 days (two different favorites, not second-favorite), Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes passed away and John Edwards admitted to an affair. But the most significant event that happened was that our Web site, jessaminejournal.com, got poll questions!

I’ll let that sink in.

Visitors to the Web site now have the ability to cast their votes on some of the pressing issues from right inside the pages of The Jessamine Journal, and the results are printed on the front page every week. Great idea, right? Let’s get an idea of what people from the community think about some of the issues that we write about, at least until we get the ability to field comments on the online versions of the story (scheduled for sometime in November of 2039).

We started off with a pretty controversial topic: Should the YMCA manage Nicholasville Parks & Recreation? This has been a fairly hot-button issue since the idea was brought before the parks board a couple months ago. In fact, it spawned so much controversy that the YMCA just withdrew its proposal last week, not wanting to appear to be competing with individual residents of the city.

Well we never believed the poll question would garner the reaction it did. The results that followed read like a play-by-play of an NBA basketball game. The nos jumped out to an early 80-20 lead before the yeses battled back to tie it at 100. From there, the yeses went on a historic 200-20 run to command a dominant lead, but the nos led an unprecedented comeback to tie it up again at 350 apiece heading into the final period. The two stayed neck-and-neck for a short stretch, but in the end, the nos were just too much for the yeses to handle and got a hard-fought 557-507 win. Kobe Bryant finished with 346 points, shattering Wilt Chamberlain’s single-game record for…sorry, I’ll quit.

Anyway, the odd thing about these vote surges is that they all came in stretches of one or two hours over a period of five days. One of those stretches came from 8-10 a.m. Monday morning. Now I’ve never actually seen a printout of our peak traffic times for the Web site, but I also wasn’t born yesterday and understand that early Monday mornings are not high-volume times for Jessamine Countians to surf the web. Something fishy was going on.

Our next poll was less argue-ey, but we were coming off of a 1,064-vote result in our first-ever poll, so we were feeling pretty good about the interest it was drawing. It was something about rating Nicholasville Now’s effectiveness. The play-by-play for that one sounded more like a hockey match — a few people scored, there was almost a fight or two, and everybody went home wondering why that sounded like such a good idea earlier in the day. Total number of votes in that poll? 101. Not 1,001 — 101, or roughly 10 percent of the previous poll’s results. Now the first poll looks even more suspicious.

We put up a new question yesterday, and so far it has done nothing to clear up either the first poll extravaganza or the second poll yawner. This week’s question is: Should the three governments look for opportunities to merge their services in a cost-saving effort to increase efficiency? I don’t make these questions up.

Well this question sounds even tamer and less controversial than the previous two. Should Nicholasville, Wilmore and Jessamine County work together to find ways to save money? Not should the three become one urban-county service area like Fayette County — just, should they see if they can’t help each other out with some services?

Well it has been up for less than 24 hours, and we are coming off of a 101-vote dud, so I wasn’t too optimistic about the turnout when I checked it before I began writing this post (Hint: I did begin writing this post, so you can assume I was wrong).

I was wrong. As of 2 p.m., there were already 295 votes in the poll! And they were skewed overwhelmingly — 249-46 — in favor of the nos.

In baseball, three at-bats is considered a small sample size. If I guy goes 2-for-3 in his major-league debut, he is batting lifetime .667, which is roughly what Zeus would bat if he went to the Kansas City Royals. So three at-bats isn’t quite enough to determine a player’s value.

But I’m going to go out on a limb, here, and draw a conclusion from the first three polls that we have conducted. Ready?

SOMEBODY IS SCREWING WITH US.

There, I said it. Somebody — maybe one person or maybe several people — has enough time on his or her hands to fix the poll question on jessaminejournal.com. This, readers, is ludicrous. Regardless of whether that fixing involves going to every computer in town and voting, calling all of your friends or deleting your cookies and voting a bagillion times in a row, it is silly and childish to fix a poll. If you have done this or are thinking of doing this in the future — stop it.

Now, in the off chance that the person doing this is not one of the six or seven people who read this blog regularly, I want to offer a different solution: I think we should stop doing polls. It’s very elementary-school to say this, but if people can’t behave, they shouldn’t get the opportunity to give their opinions. My editor, Mike Moore, who thinks of the question and logs the results, is out of town the rest of the week, but I am going to pitch that idea to him when he gets back. If nothing else, I will write a column in the paper about it so hopefully more people will get a chance to hear how silly they are.

But for now, just know that our poll results are in no way scientific. I said earlier today that they aren’t even unscientific results, which Casey Castle pointed out was a stupid thing to say, so I’ll stick with the first comment, but you know what I mean.