NHL All-Star voting debacle

In case you don't already know, the NHL All-Star game's online voting campaign began recently.

The idea is novel: Let the fans choose the starting lineup, make them register for the new NHL.com in the process, and then let them vote as many times as they want.

Yes, as many times as your heart desires.

Which is where the Montreal Canadiens fans have stepped in to take advantage of the voting system in a way a politician could only dream of.

Thanks to an auto-voting script, the Montreal Canadiens are the front-runners for all six starting slots on the Eastern Conference All-Star team.

So I decided to take it upon myself to see how easy it was to set up an auto-voting script. With no computer programming skills, and not wanting to invest much time into the process, I just did a simple Google search for Montreal Canadiens All-Star voting script.

Results were quickly returned, and I was taken to the Canadiens board, where I was directed to this message (below) about how to set up FireFox to auto-vote for me.

It was actually quite easy to set up. I followed the directions and, next thing I know, Saku Koivu is getting an unlimited amount of votes from my computer. Here's the best part: You can open multiple windows, say 10, and run the script in 10 separate windows, each casting votes.

This isn't the first time an auto-voting script has been used to rig the results of an online voting campaign. Just recently, users from the online message board 4chan voted Rick Astley (of RickRoll fame) the "Best Act Ever."

So what should the NHL do? They are allowing multiple votes from a single computer, so it's not like Canadiens fans are breaking the rules. But, at the same time, does Saku Koivu really deserve to be a starter over say Sidney Crosby or Alex Semin?