How on earth can you get the top 6 exchanges getting 100% and then next getting 78%.
Classic Soviet style voting
The whole process is a total, sham, scam and scandal.
We shoudl needless to say get BT infinity by right which of course you do if you live in a big city which the majority of people don't

Were not talking about big exchanges here, were talking a few thousand lines, its far easier to get community backing at those exchanges than a large town with 20000+ (a lot like mine) we managed 2%.

You don't need broadband to vote. Some people purposemy not take it up because of speed, singling out those without broadband isnt fair on a community.

In the run up to the final stages of this competition, I have performed hard copy comparisons of the final votes registered on the league table with the position as at 19 December 2010.
In doing it this way, it is quite noticeable that the top 7 all managed to register a fairly significant number of votes in the final days of the competition. One exchange even managed to register an additional 590 votes which, given the time of the year and the fact that these were probably from those that were not initially interested in the first instance, is highly questionable.

However, what caught my eye was the fact that Castleton (Gwent) had managed to lose 738 votes in the same period. I have hard copy printouts which indicate that its registered votes on 19/12 were 1190 (7th in the league table) but by 31/12 these had been reduced to 452 (37th in league table).

I thus concluded that the veracity of the competition would seem to be questionable and emailed my concerns to the organisation running the league table which claims it is unofficial and not affiliated with BT. I was very surprised to receive the following response:

�The data for this comes from BT so they are the best people to ask.

Obviously there was some cheating involved in the competition and hopefully BT have since verified the results.

Thanks for using the website�.

Quite an astonishing admission here but it�s all rather academic now that BT has supposedly completed an audit of a number of votes cast during December and announced the winners of its Race to Infinity competition.

Don't see why it is a "right" to have a service paid for by investment funded by private sector shareholders at their risk?

Suggest you read elsewhere about the "100%" levels of registration - broadly it seems to be down to the increase in properties in the exchange area, remembering that it is a vote per property within the exchange area, not per working exchange line.

Rather than looking at this so negatively, surely better to think that nobody is any worse off as a result of the exercise, and that 6 towns or villages are now better off. Hardly a "scam, sham and even a scandal"!

Easy to be positive when you already have BT Infinity.

In reply to a post by Broadbean2:

it is quite noticeable that the top 7 all managed to register a fairly significant number of votes in the final days of the competition. One exchange even managed to register an additional 590 votes which, given the time of the year and the fact that these were probably from those that were not initially interested in the first instance, is highly questionable.

Never let the facts or lack of understanding get in the way of a good gripe eh?

The later votes were almost certainly texted votes. These were handled by a third party company and transmitted to BT for manual entry (!) into the system. As a result, a large backlog of text votes were only entered in the latter stages of the competition, by BT (or their agents). We noticed that a lot of our texted votes didn't appear for a week or more.

In reply to a post by Broadbean2:

However, what caught my eye was the fact that Castleton (Gwent) had managed to lose 738 votes in the same period. I have hard copy printouts which indicate that its registered votes on 19/12 were 1190 (7th in the league table) but by 31/12 these had been reduced to 452 (37th in league table).

Sigh - again if you check the facts, you'll see that many exchanges (the winning ones included) also lost votes in a badly managed culling operation early one morning. BT offered little/no explanation for this and we know that perfectly valid votes were culled. The fact that we were able to recover these votes by asking people to re-vote only confirms this. Perhaps Castleton's votes were not so valid in the first place - I don't know - you'd have to ask them why they weren't able to recover many.

In reply to a post by Broadbean2:

I thus concluded that the veracity of the competition would seem to be questionable and emailed my concerns to the organisation running the league table which claims it is unofficial and not affiliated with BT. I was very surprised to receive the following response:

�The data for this comes from BT so they are the best people to ask.

Obviously there was some cheating involved in the competition and hopefully BT have since verified the results.

Thanks for using the website�.

Quite an astonishing admission here but it�s all rather academic now that BT has supposedly completed an audit of a number of votes cast during December and announced the winners of its Race to Infinity competition.

Assuming you mean http://racetoinfinityandbeyond.veadas.net/league
then it's just a hobby site run by an individual scraping the voting data from the BT website. No "astonishing admission" since it's nothing to do with BT...

Hope this helps.

Mark H

Either BT got their initial target numbers completely wrong for some exchanges, or there has been some "creative voting" (Soviet style someone said).

As anyone who understand the statistics of voting with a public population, 100% (or even close) is impossible.

And the fact that the percentages fall off so dramatically after the first few, also should sound warning bells.

I hope a full (and transparent) investigation takes place and is published

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

As anyone who understand the statistics of voting with a public population, 100% (or even close) is impossible.

Anyone who understands statistics will never use the word "impossible".

In reply to a post by orly:

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

Did anyone else spot the exchange that a few days before the race closed was showing 103% registrations?

Coffins have broadband on that exchange it seems

As I said before BT's database of premises is seriously flawed. Campaigners in Madingley visited every address covered by the exchange, and there were more than the 2132 given by BT as the total. I reckon BT's list is simply out of date; I don't know about the others, but both Madingley and Caxton have had large new developments built within the last few years