Real Clear Politics Responds

Just received in email,

----- Original Message -----
From: Russell, David
To: lewwaters@msn.com
Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2007 12:09 PM
Subject: RCP Reader Articles

Dear Mr. Waters,

We came across your blog post about the Reader Articles. Others have written to us about this problem and we are addressing it. We have sent the following letter to those people. I would have posted it as a comment, but I didn't have a Blogger ID. Please consider this a response to your post.

Thank you,

-David Russell

------------------------

Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention. We care deeply about the site's integrity and take our responsibility to provide an unbiased source of political information seriously. So I wanted to provide some context to why we've been blocking user accounts the last few weeks.

We have been receiving complaints that some readers are using multiple logins and are gaming the system to inflate the votes to their links on ReaderArticles. So we've been closely monitoring the article submissions and votes, and temporarily blocking accounts that we think are being used to cast multiple votes from the same user.

A lot of the blocked accounts were obvious double accounts (for instance: joesmith1@yahoo.com and joesmith1@gmail.com) and we feel that blocking these accounts made ReaderArticles a better feature.

However, if your complaints are accurate, we may have been too aggressive in blocking accounts. We want to reassure all of you that this is not a conspiracy toward any candidate, party, or ideology.

In future, we will send out an email and allow a user to respond before blocking his/her account.

If you feel like your account has been unfairly blocked, please email me at (drussell at realclearpolitics.com) and I will look into it.

We appreciate the contribution you all make to RCP as active participants and apologize for any inconvenience caused by this action.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

Thanks,

-David Russell