Last week, we ran a Slog poll on the mayor's race. Six hours before it closed, Mayor Mike McGinn held first place with more than 40 percent of the vote, while the next closest candidates, Council Member Bruce Harrell and state senator Ed Murray, had only about 20 percent each. But then last Friday, in those final few hours, thousands of new votes flooded the poll, and the results flipped. Suddenly Harrell was leading with 42 percent, Murray had 34 percent, and McGinn was trailing at only 21 percent.

What happened? It appears some folks—or maybe just one person—were (perhaps with the help of bots) stuffing ballots in our legally binding Slog poll. Our tech-savvy at risk youth looked at the results, finding that the top-voting IP address voted for Murray 1,684 times (there were 66 votes for others from that IP, too), the next highest voted for Bruce Harrell 1,203 times, and the next voted for Harrell 999 times. There were 11 IP addresses with more than 100 votes each, which collectively accounted for 5,941 votes. These new votes were overwhelmingly for Murray and Harrell. Maybe one of those IPs is a skyscraper packed with actual humans who are more than 20-1 in favor of Murray and who all put off voting in the online poll until just before it closed. Or maybe there's a bungalow in North Seattle populated with thousands of procrastinating Harrell supporters—but that seems unlikely. So we scrubbed the votes from IPs with a curiously high number of votes to fix things, which, admittedly, is a blunt instrument. That actually reduced votes for all the candidates—McGinn lost some too—but mostly for Murray and Harrell.

Now the final results are much closer to the results before all the fishy business. McGinn has 53 percent of the vote, Murray has 26 percent, and Harrell has 12 percent.

Stay classy, folks. It's nice to know that people are so obsessed with—I know it's legally binding and all, but really?—a Slog poll.