Indian American Muslim Council has called on TIME magazine to disqualify Indian politicians from the 2014 TIME 100 online poll.
“Millions of fake online votes were cast using automated systems for Indian politicians Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal, sometime running into 1,000 votes every 5 seconds. In the two hours between 1:15-3:15PM today [22 April, 2014] (past midnight in India), over 1.4 million votes were cast for candidate Narendra Modi. Since 6PM last evening (21 April 2014), over 4 million votes were cast for Modi and 2 million for Kejriwal. This polling fraud has implications on the ongoing Indian elections where perceptions on the outcome of the TIME poll have impact on the masses. Over 300 parliamentary seats go to polls in India between now and 12 May,” said IAMC Ishaq Syed in a statement on 22 April.
“While the TIME Magazine poll is known to have been rigged for the last several years, the Magazine has done little to address the issue. Although a detailed account of how Katie Perry was pushed to the top spot in last year’s TIME poll through automated polling has been published by hackers, TIME continues to use the same polling service. What is rather alarming is that TIME seems to actually believe in the authenticity of its own online poll and is publishing ‘news’ reports based on how Kejriwal and Modi are leading in their poll,” he added.
In order to demonstrate how easy it is to crack the TIME poll, IAMC has listed below step-wise technical details on how fake voting can be automated on the TIME Magazine poll:
1. Open a Facebook account
2. Using a browser recording tool such as Selenium, record a session for the following:
i. Go to TIME Magazine poll, click on the person to vote.
ii. It will give the option to login to Facebook or Twitter. Login into Facebook.
iii. This will result in the poll service accepting the vote.
3. Write a script that does the following:
i. Clear all cookies and other private data from the browser
ii. Play the Selenium recording
4. Write an auto initialization script that continuously runs the above.
5. Save the virtual image of the machine.
6. Use the virtual image to launch hundreds or thousands of machines on a cloud service or data centre to cast their millions of votes for the person of your choice.
This loophole can easily be plugged by TIME through the introduction of industry standard techniques such as Captchas, however TIME has persistently ignored poll fraud on its site for the last several years.
IAMC also called upon the Election Commission of India to ensure that the results of TIME 100 poll are not used as a publicity tool by the Indian political parties during the course of these elections.