MLB Has Thrown Out 60 to 65 Million All-Star Votes, But Has Incentive Not to Restrict Voting

The Kansas City Royals continue to lead the way with All-Star voting, raising the discussion on an exhibition game to astronomical heights. Last week, Cardillo and I talked about the Royals’ All-Star Game issues, and today, comes word that MLB would like you to know that they are keeping an eye on it.

According to this article by Jeff Passan, MLB has thrown out a sizable number of votes.

" More than 300 million votes have been accepted, according to the league, and the record of 390 million should fall sometime this week. Almost certainly a half-billion votes will be cast by the time balloting ends at 11:59 p.m. ET on July 2. And that doesn’t include the massive amounts of votes Bob Bowman, the CEO of MLB Advanced Media, said the league disallowed because of concerns over fake or improper voting. “I’m not saying we bat 1.000,” Bowman said. “But it’s between 60 and 65 million votes that have been canceled. We don’t really trumpet it because if someone thinks they’re getting away with it, they’ll try to again.” "

Think about that. First of all, I guess they are now trumpeting that they throw out votes. But the rationale is that not trumpeting it means that you will try it again, thinking you are getting away with it, when you are wasting your time.

And that is dependent on the quality of the control.

Consider this post on the issues with the MLB All-Star voting. All a voter has to do is provide a name, birth date, unverified e-mail, and favorite team.

In other words, you don’t have to actually have the e-mail account, or access to it. You just have to provide an e-mail address. According to the WTOP story, it may be the equivalent of page views (votes) that incentivizes MLB not to put up too many barriers to increase the numbers.

"Of course, the whole voting process is also sponsored by Esurance, and MLB.com’s ability to sell itself to advertisers depends on its ability to drive traffic to its sites. Limiting such traffic would be something of a self-defeating enterprise from a financial standpoint. With more than 300 million votes already reported to be tallied already, why stop? “If they’re charging Esurance based on actual traffic?” says Colburn. “What a windfall.”"

We know that some of the cases involve people submitting under someone else’s e-mail, often as a joke. A few writers have been notified that they have voted for the Royals in the All-Star game, even though they weren’t the ones doing the voting. (often in response to complaining about the All-Star voting).

MLB says that if someone sees that votes have been cast using their e-mail address, they can contact MLB customer service and it will be investigated. But how many times will people be actually willing to follow through with that? Yeah, they might be catching a few that are obvious fraud cases, but it seems like a weird system.

The one thing it is good at is increasing the vote totals. The record for all-star votes should be established by the next update, and it’s onward and upward with votes and records from there.