Voting Irregularities

C-Change, the hosts of this competition, are a group of young people like yourselves. We set up this event because we are genuinely trying to do something to change attitudes towards climate change and make people more aware of the impact their lifesyle has, and their responsibility to do something about it. We hoped that people would respect our aims and would enter into the spirit of this event in good faith.

Unfortunately we have become aware that not everyone is being entirely honest in the way they are participating. An analysis of the IP addresses which votes and comments are coming from shows that some people are faking it - setting up lots of hotmail accounts to place extra votes from. We have not, until now, restricted the number of votes from any IP address because we didn't want exclude people who are using a computer at their school, college or workplace which may share the same IP address with other people there. However our investigations have shown that, in all but a very few case, the multiple votes are coming from residential broadband IPs. Whilst you might get your mum and dad and brothers and sisters and so on to vote for you on the same IP address it is simply not credible that 96 people - all with hotmail accounts and different surnames - have voted from the same address.

Reluctantly we decided to restrict voting to one vote per IP address. This will apply to anyone voting in future and multiple votes already cast from the same IP address have now been removed. We are sorry if a few genuine votes get lost in this process but it seems far fairer than to let the competition be hijacked by a few people who have too much time on their hands and use it to set up fake emails.

C-Change wants to see a fairer and more responsible world. We all have to start with ourselves. There are lots of 'carbon cheats' out there - those with money and power who can just afford to gobble up far more than their share of the world's resources, and emit far more than their share of greenhouse gases. Honesty, transparency, and fairness are going to be really crucial to saving the planet. Let's start here guys!

Thanks,
The C-Change Team