Below are the live results for the 2019 Best Construction Blog competition.
Pole Barn Guru has powered ahead of Chicago mechanical contractor F.E. Moran with a surge of late Friday (Feb. 8) votes. It looks like most of the votes are coming from employees and others closely connected with these businesses.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with these votes — they are within the rules. On the other hand, I decided the competition needed an independent judging panel some years ago when I tried to determine a way to help ensure fairness, because otherwise larger organizations would almost certainly be guaranteed to win each competition.
Initially, I tried a solution to “ban” more than one response from a specific IP address/location. The idea behind this system (available within the Wufoo forms/polling software) is to prevent fraudulent voting — namely many email addresses operated by the same individual/organization from the same server.
The problem with the one-vote-per-address option, however is that it perversely discriminates against larger organizations. If it had remained in place a single person in a 500-person office could banish all of his or her peers, while a small five-person organization with employees working from their homes would collect at least five votes.
The solution — unlimited voting (but one per email address only) has limitations. It can be gamed, just as I can create many email addresses on my server. However, ultimately this sort of cheating will fail, because of the judging process.
Nevertheless, it makes sense for serious contenders to seek out as many votes as possible. While the greatest popular vote doesn’t guarantee a win of the overall competition, there still is recognition for the popular vote and higher vote rankings will certainly be a factor in the overall competition winner.
Here’s the voting form:
[wufoo username=”constructionnrhroup” formhash=”k1ow4ye61enj82d” autoresize=”true” height=”1381″ header=”show” ssl=”true”]
