Seattle artist Henry Ward was robbed.
Last year, a design contest was held to determine the mural design to be painted on the dome of the Space Needle to replace the 50 year anniversary commemorative orange. The winning design was “Trees” entered by Seattle Graphic designer Nicole Commins. Now that the Space Needle transformation is complete, it appears that Ms. Commins won with the help of hackers. There is, however, no evidence she had anything at all to do with rigging the vote.
According to a KIRO News investigative report:
"Deep Blue Sea" carried around 21,000 public votes. "Roots" was a respectable second with 15,000. "Trees" was a distant third with about 11,000 supporters.
Public online voting, at this point, had been going on for 23 days.
Then, in just a few hours, witnesses said “Trees” gained around 10,000 votes -- nearly doubling its month-long vote total.
The runner up submission “Deep Blue Sea”, created by local artist Henry Ward, was presumably the legitimate winner.
The Space Needle Corporation has responded with what amounts to an “oh well, shit happens”.
“we structured the voting process to be as simple as possible. In any online competition with voting involved, anomalies in the process can be expected."
Seattle hacker “Pipedream”, a real life Amazon.com software engineer, bragged on a blog that he could rig the vote.
“Their (the Space Needle’s) voting system is really poorly written. Their server-side script is vulnerable to a [sic] SQL injection attack.”
It is not known whether Pipedream was the actual culprit.
Henry Ward, needless to say, is not happy. He was convinced the vote was rigged from the beginning, and tried to get the Space Needle Corporation to investigate before announcing a winner. After the winner was announced, he continued to lobby the company to investigate and reconsider, but they were not cooperative. It was only after the KIRO investigation they rather unsympathetically acknowledged there were “anomalies”.
Tough luck, Henry.
"Trees"
"Deep Blue Sea"