Polling on the Web is notoriously inaccurate. Still, designers at Abortion.com decided not to take any chances when they asked people to answer the question, "Where do you stand on abortion?" The site not only lets people vote multiple times, but appears to funnel votes on either side of the issue straight to the anti-abortion tally.
Purporting to be a nonpartisan public forum created "to discuss the complexities of the issue," Abortion.com offers articulate arguments both for and against abortion, then asks users to vote their choice. But voting pro-choice proves easier said than done.
"Every time you click on the pro-choice button, it adds two to five votes to the pro-life tally while the pro-choice numbers barely budge," says Nicole Nestle of California Abortion Rights Action League. In fact, as of midafternoon Wednesday, the anti-abortion movement seemed to have a runaway victory on its hands: Pro-choicers, who outnumbered anti-abortionists 53 to 36 percent of the population in a recent Gallup Poll, commanded a mere 13 percent of the vote at Abortion.com.
Robert Gould, vice president of marketing for the site's ISP, Alchemy Communications in Chatsworth, California, said Abortion.com is a highly used site that has drawn both attempts to sway the voting and 15 or 20 complaining phone calls a day.
"We found a university kid who set up a click bot that would vote bang, bang, bang every few seconds," Gould said, giving one example of a frequent problem on the site. He said the click bots had been traced back to religious colleges. He declined to name specific institutions.
"I'd say 99 percent of the [phone] inquiries I get are saying the voting is unfair," he added. Citing a confidentiality agreement, he declined to identify the site's owner.
Gould said that Alchemy technicians try, in conjunction with the owner, to spot obvious attempts to manipulate the vote and clean up the tally.
A more familiar Web ploy may also be queering the results, says one abortion rights activist who trolls hardcore Christian right Web sites pseudonymously. Anti-abortionists have begun forwarding the site's URL to right-wing listservs.
"There's a Web site that President Clinton is supposedly using to determine how pro-life or pro-choice the US really is," says one 6 May post on Christianity Today's message board. "Pastors are encouraging everyone with the ability to log on and vote pro-life to get the numbers more balanced."
But the uneven vote tally means that even efforts to get out the pro-choice vote result in bad numbers.
"The listing seemed a little fishy when I saw it," says Shellie Holubek, organizer of D. C. Webgrrls. Holubek, who received the listing from Seattle Webgrrls, decided to take off the seemingly pro-choice admonition to D. C. Webgrrls users to log on and vote. "Our users fall on both sides of the issue anyway."
Wallpapered with softly lit, pink, smiling babies, cooing moms and American flags, Abortion.com, which says it will forward monthly results to the president, senators and members of Congress, seems to raise few fears among the pro-choice community.
"Anti-choice people fix stats all the time, but they rarely do it so badly," said Nestle said with a laugh. As she spoke, her co-workers were voting pro-choice, then watching as the anti-abortion numbers rose.
