Malaysiakini's opinion poll has been subjected to rigging and manipulation, claimed a senior DAP leader today.

According to DAP national publicity secretary Ronnie Liu, the party received information that the malaysiakini poll, 'Which young DAP leader can best lead the party?', is "completely unreliable".

Liu said irregularities were found on the day the poll was activated last Wednesday.

"This became quite blatant on the second day when in less than two hours, there was a sudden jump of 30 percent in the votes, with about 80 percent going to one particular candidate," he said.

As of 2pm today, out of a total of 24,599 votes, former DAP vice-chairman Lim Guan Eng leads with 9,974 votes with Youth chief Teng Chang Kim closely trailing at 9,464 votes.

Liu came in a distant third with 1,953 votes.

The other candidates in the race are up-and-coming DAP leaders Kerk Kim Hock, Teresa Kok, Gobind Singh Deo, and Fong Po Kuan.

According to Liu, a 'tech savvy DAP member' was so intrigued by the unusual pattern of the poll that he decided to test whether it could be manipulated.

"He found to his surprise that not only can it be manipulated, but it was indeed being manipulated over the past few days," he said.

" Malaysiakini should give serious consideration to developing an Internet poll which though not completely full-proof from rigging or manipulation, but at least would not be amenable to manipulation and rigging to the extent of 70 to 80 percent of its results," Ronnie urged.

Block multiple votes

Internet security expert Dinesh Nair, who is also malaysiakini 's technical advisor, said while it is possible to utilise 'cookies' to block multiple votes, it still would not prevent a person from writing a simple script which directs a particular computer to vote repeatedly.

He explained this method was used to compromise a malaysiakini poll early this year.

In February, a poll on "Who can lead MCA best?" saw certain candidates garnering unusually high number of votes.

Dinesh helped malaysiakini identify the source of the problem, which was traced to a computer located in the University of British Columbia, Canada.

After being alerted by malaysiakini , the university authorities launched its own investigations.

It identified one of the university students as the source of the attacks, and the culprit was eventually apprehended and punished.

Since this episode, malaysiakini has added a number of new safeguards to make the poll less susceptible to manipulation, especially those seeking vote more than once.

Privacy violation

According to Dinesh, Internet users will need to trade in their privacy if they want an accurate poll.

"Sometimes, it is difficult to tread the fine line between functionality and privacy," Dinesh said.

He said the use of 'cookies' can lead to the accusation of privacy violation and vote-tracking, a method which is not favoured by malaysiakini .

'Cookies' are codes sent by the website via its host server to the user's computer for identification by the host. Therefore, the host computer can identify the users whenever they come into contact and block out those seeking to vote more than once.

"I would hazard that a lot of malaysiakini 's readers would be afraid of 'being tracked by the government' if they were caught reading the website," he said.

"The bottom line is that it is a straw poll, and malaysiakini bills it as such. If the numbers seem illogical, then they most likely are."

Dinesh also said that such poll manipulation shows the trouble some people would go to skew the votes.

"Why would anyone of sound integrity want to corrupt the results of public opinion if there isn't any hidden agenda?" he asked.

Poll registration

Meanwhile, malaysiakini 's chief executive officer Premesh Chandran said the best way to overcome this shortcoming is to require participants to register their e-mails before polling.

"What we have now is the most common poll method. But since people are taking our poll seriously, we should move into a registered poll system," he said.

"Of course, if someone register with us 500 times using 500 different e-mail addresses, then that person could vote 500 times," he said.

Premesh, however, said the registration system would make the poll more full-poof as fewer people would go to the length of registering numerous times, using different e-mails addresses.

He said that malaysiakini will be upgrading its polling system early next year so that it will be less prone to manipulation.