The 2015 MLB All-Star Game will not occur for another four-plus weeks, meaning there will be another four weeks of the continued Royals voting madness. After the latest balloting update revealed that eight Kansas City position players were slated to the start the Midsummer Classic, uproar over fairness of the system intensified and led many to rip non-deserving players and the oblivious fans that keep voting for them.
Inquiries have been made into the voting process, one that allows fans to vote as many times as they’d like by simply inputting different (oftentimes fake) e-mail addresses and hitting the maximum number of allowed ballots for each e-mail. There’s also curiosities into voting bots that constantly submit a certain player’s name on thousands, if not millions, of ballots. And it appears that Major League Baseball has caught more than a few fraudulent votes, 65 million of them actually.
Bob Bowman, CEO of MLB Advanced Media told Yahoo! Sports that they scrapped around the ballots because of the possibility of fraud.
It’s between 60 and 65 million votes that have been canceled. We don’t really trumpet it because if someone thinks they’re getting away with it, they’ll try to again.
Bowman did not say how many votes are cancelled each year and if this year is an outlier, one that has impacted the Royals ability to dominate the AL starting lineup. But he did say they took a closer look at the process this year because of the millions cast for their players.
We said, ‘Can this possibly be right? Look at all these votes for Kansas City.’ It just didn’t turn out that way.
It’s also unclear when the votes were removed, if Monday’s totals reflected the 65 million votes that were removed and what percentage of the removed votes were for Royals players.
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