Election Fraud, MLB All-Star Game Edition

If you relish the idea of subverting democracy as much as I do, I encourage you to go to here and start filling out All Star Game ballots. As many as you like, as ridiculously as you can.

In the old days it used be one fan, one ballot, no internet voting. Kind of like in a real democracy but without any adverse effects on American foreign policy. This enabled the Jays, then drawing 50,000 fans a game, to send multiple all-stars off in 1991 (3), 1992 (3) and 1993 (6!). As it stands now, odds are very long that you'll ever see another Blue Jay voted to start an All-Star game ever again; we're now a relative baseball backwater, Fox and ESPN coverage is all about the Bosox and Yankees, and fans in bigger markets can use online voting to stack the odds for their hometown faves.

Way way back in the early days of online ASG voting in the late '90s, my old roommate Newfy Richard and I stuffed the ballot box with thousands of votes for a little known Jays second baseman Homer Bush. Almost a decade later my recollection as to why we latched onto Bush are more than a little hazy, but it was probably some combination of his cool name, basestealing prowess, and .300 average. Or maybe it was because he was black as midnight and had a pretty bad ass presence in the middle infield.

Our tireless efforts were in vain in the end and baseball fans foolishly elected Roberto Alomar, then of the Indians, as their second base dictator for life.

Fast forward to the present day and mlb.com has greatly facilitated ASG ballot box stuffing in a manner that would have been mind-boggling to the 21-year-old version of myself back in that flop house on Florence St. in Ottawa. Nowadays, all you have to do is enter your "name", date of birth and email address and you're given 25 ballots. After you've completed and submitted your ballot, you're given the option of voting again. And, to make the process easier, your next ballot has your previous selections already checked off, allowing you to mindlessly replicate your first ballot with minimal effort.

If you want to set up another email account, say, mohammed_jihad@gmail.com or studpowercock@hotmail.com, you can vote another 25 times. And so it continues.

Who have I voted for? These guys:

AL:

1B - Lyle Overbay
2B - Aaron Hill
SS - David Eckstein
3B - Scott Rolen
C - Gregg Zaun
OF - Alex Rios
OF - Matt Stairs
OF - Vernon Wells
DH - Billy Butler (like I'd vote for Frank Thomas...)

NL:

1B - Connor Jackson
2B - Orlando Hudson
SS - Stevie Drew
3B - Mark Reynolds
C - Cory Snyder
OF - Eric Byrnes
OF - Justin Upton
OF - Chris B. Young

All-deserving of ASG selection, I might add.

I'm not encouraging you to do likewise as some sort of lame old repeat Rory Fitzpatrick campaign for Marco Scutaro, but I do hope you'll join me in making a mockery of the entire ASG voting process. I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy never works. This small gesture of defiance is ultimately meaningless, but so are about 95% of things we do in life.

Game Notes:

* Alex Rios has looked like shit at the dish all night. And he just strikes out for the third? time tonight... let's hope he gets another AB in the 9th so he can go for the Golden Sombrero. He deserves to be stripped of his job "indefinitely", released, or sent down to Syracuse for more seasoning in my humble opinion.

* Fucking Hinske. Fuck. Ing. Hinske.

* Did anyone else think that Lyle Overbay "double" was actually a homer that hit the black facing beyond the outfield wall, then bounced off the top of wall and back onto the field of play?

* If the Jays don't scratch their way back here I'm blaming Jamie Campbell for the L.

-- Johnny Was