The Cincinnati Enquirer has decided to re-do the round of voting for the “TV Anchor Dream Team” contest pairings that were hacked, this time with security measures in place to ensure the purity of the vote.

For those who haven’t been following the drama surrounding the local anchor popularity tournament, eight anchors ranked from one to eight were paired off against each other in four categories: male, female, sports and weather in NCAA style brackets. However, the first round of meteorologists and one sports anchor pairing was hacked by an Internet bot which supercharged the totals for some anchors. One pairing drew more than 105,000 votes in a little more than ten hour period.

The Enquirer’s John Kiesewetter told TVSpy the paper still doesn’t know who hacked the contest or why. Voters will now have to enter a security code for each vote they cast. Read more

First Major League Baseball had BALCO, then the Tour de France had Lance Armstrong, now the Cincinnati Enquirer’s “TV Anchor Dream Team Tournament” is in jeopardy because of Internet bots.

John Kiesewetter, the Enquirer’s media writer, told TVSpy between Wednesday at noon and 10:30 a.m. Thursday, more than 105,000 votes were cast in the meteorologist race between Steve Horstmeyer (WXIX) and John Gumm (WKRC). For what it’s worth, according to Nielsen’s 2012-2013 rankings, Cincinnati market has 897,890 households.

A clearly frustrated Kiesewetter wrote the competition would go on despite the hacking, “I never thought that people would abuse the system. I was wrong. We don’t have a way right now to prevent autobot voting. So we’ve decided not to shut down the voting on my blog here, which ends at Thursday noon.” Read more