The cheerful, and lubricated, spirit of the Park City Area Restaurant Association’s annual summer Savor the Cocktail contest was dampened this year by a case of cheating, said the group’s executive director, Ginger Wicks.
Their team had noticed some suspicious activity on the voting site over the weekend, she said, and by Tuesday it was alarmingly clear that someone, or something, had hijacked the voting system.
“We had at least one participant, maybe more, write a program that took over the website and was just casting votes,” she said.
They had issues of voting fraud in the past, so had set up a system which required a valid email and a secondary step through a confirmation email. But the bot was designed to create fake emails and complete the confirmation step.
“As an example, it would be like gingerreece102@gmail.com, and then it would be gingerreece103@gmail.com and gingerreece104@gmail.com, and this would go on for 50,000 votes,” Wicks said.
The time stamps showed that the bot was creating emails, casting and confirming votes within a second — impossible for a real user to do.
And the backend showed all those votes were going to just one cocktail.
“I don’t want to throw the person under the rug. They know who they are. I’ve had conversations with them. But that’s really not the point of it,” said Wicks.
The point, she said, is that their small-town, friendly competition was ruined for all participants.
“We are here to support our members and to spread the word about our amazing members and all the amazing offerings in Park City,” said Wicks. “To have our members sabotage a promotion that we’ve created to support them is a hard pill to swallow, to be honest.”
The only cost to participate in the contest, which is designed to drive extra business to the establishments, is the annual membership fee to the Park City Area Restaurant Association. Plus, they’re offered a $500 cash prize and a highly-valued marketing package. Basically free for participants, but not free for the association to put on.
“We have spent months preparing for this. We have to create the system on the website to upload all the entries, to manage the voting, to creating a digital advertising plan, running ads in your paper, working with television stations to get interviews for the participants,” she said. “There’s a lot of people behind the scenes, and there’s a lot of work that goes into trying to provide a platform to showcase our establishments and the mixologists in our community.”
There were over 200,000 invalid votes cast, Wicks said, making it virtually impossible to determine the actual winner, so they decided not to try and announce a winner.
They don’t plan on ending the contest, though.
“We certainly don’t want this to be the end of the cocktail contest. That’s not fair to the participants that participated fairly,” Wicks said. “Honestly, I kind of hope that this will inspire everybody to remember the spirit of our small-town community. … Of course, winning is super important, but it’s not everything.”
The board of the association will meet to decide how to proceed with participants who showed unsportsmanlike behavior, based on evidence they’ve found on the backend of their voting website.
“I think it’s always good to digest these things and have some good, thoughtful conversation about it before you make any rash decisions,” said Wicks.
They have over a year to make a plan for next summer’s event, hopeful for a more honest outcome. Until then, they’re gearing up for October’s annual Dine About festivities, leaving this, for now, in the past.