4 Cases of All-Star Voter Fraud

When Major League Baseball announced the early vote leaders for the 2015 All-Star Game, something seemed...off. Of the nine available starting positions for the American League, eight first-place spots were held by Kansas City Royals players. If this stands, Angels outfielder Mike Trout will be the only starter for the American League all-stars without a "KC" on his hat.

While many people were quick to call "fraud," Major League Baseball came out and said the results are on the level. This marks the first year that voting is held completely online, and each person is allowed to cast up to 35 ballots. Kansas City fans have taken advantage of this more than their rivals, meaning the secret to their team's dominance on this front is no more complicated than hitting "send" over and over again.

Although the very nature of all-star voting invites trickery, All-Star Game lore is littered with examples of particularly egregious and actual frauds. Here are a few of our favorites.

1. The 1957 Redlegs Become an All-Star Team

Of course not. You have to give the people of Cincinnati credit for one of the most well-organized All-Star campaigns in history, though. Since all of the voting was done on paper, the Cincinnati Enquirer printed filled-out ballots and distributed them with newspapers. All fans needed to do was gather some copies of the pre-marked ballots and turn them in. Rumors swirled that bars in Cincinnati wouldn't serve customers without the patron first filling out a ballot. A commissioner's investigation supposedly learned that over half of the votes cast for the National League's roster originated in Cincinnati.

Sensing something was seriously amiss, Commissioner Ford C. Frick quickly stepped in to rectify the situation. He booted Redlegs outfielder Wally Post from the team entirely and moved Gus Bell to the bench. In their places, Mays and Aaron got starting nods in the outfield. Frick went one step further, too; he stripped the fans of their all-star voting rights entirely. From 1958 to 1970, managers and players chose the rosters with no input from fans.

2. Hacker Gets Behind Nomar

3. Vote for Rory

During the 2007 NHL season, hockey fan Steve Schmid had the idea that it would be fun to see a non-star play in the All-Star Game. He wanted to find just an average old hockey player and try to vote him in. He chose Rory Fitzpatrick, a journeyman defenseman who had enjoyed a long, if fairly unremarkable, career. Since all of the all-star voting was online, it seemed easy to start a grass-roots movement behind Fitzpatrick. And it was. On the strength of the website voteforrory.com and a series of funny YouTube videos endorsing his candidacy, Fitzpatrick's vote total surged. The people were finally getting their say!

Actually, the people and a clever computer program were getting their say, and the computer program was doing most of the heavy lifting. After the debacle of Nandor's voting spree in 1999, leagues had started to crack down on vote hacking, but as usual, the hackers were one or two steps ahead. The NHL tried to ward off fraud using CAPTCHA to verify each vote as coming from a human user, but the league only used a handful of phrases in its verification. Each phrase had an easily identifiable file name, so hackers were able to build the Rory Vote-o-Matic, a program that could automatically cast thousands of write-in ballots for Fitzpatrick while still making CAPTCHA happy.

Ultimately, Fitzpatrick finished in third place in the voting behind Scott Niedermayer and Nicklas Lidstrom, so he didn't make the All-Star Game. However, he received an impressive 550,177 votes, and some observers, including Daniel Engber of Slate, thought maybe the NHL monkeyed with the vote totals to keep Fitzpatrick at home.

4. The WNBA Revels in "Punch Parties"

If anyone ever tells you the WNBA doesn't have any fans, show the 2007 all-star voting numbers. Thousands and thousands of votes were cast for various WNBA stars, and you should be able to prove just how beloved the WNBA is. Thanks to the always-intrepid investigative work of Dan Steinberg of the D.C. Sports Bog, though, you can look beyond the numbers. Steinberg picked up on a piece from the Detroit Shock's website advertising a "Punch Party" in which fans would come together to punch Detroit players' names on all-star ballots. Fans who punched 15 ballots were given the chance to meet and get autographs from Deanna Nolan, and filling out 100 ballots got them the right to meet Kara Braxton and head coach Bill Laimbeer. Everyone who filled out ballots got entries into a raffle for Shock memorabilia.

While teams usually encourage their fans to vote early and often, it's tough to find much precedent for outright bribery to get them to do so. Whatever your stance on the tactic, it worked: Nolan, Braxton, and Shock forward Cheryl Ford all got starting nods for the game.

A version of this story was originally published in 2008.