Online news portal malaysiakini has detected several attempts to manipulate the outcome of its poll related to the United States presidential elections.

Early this morning, 734 votes for incumbent George W Bush had been recorded from two computers originating from the US.

To preserve integrity, malaysiakini has since blocked these computers from further accessing the online poll. It will also remove the extra votes from the final tally.

One computer, with the Internet protocol (IP) address of 199.222.143.242, is located in Rockhill, South Carolina. It provided 378 votes in favour of Bush.

The second computer, with the IP address of 66.119.34.39, is from the town of Cary, North Carolina, had 'voted' 356 times, also for Bush.

Malaysiakini's poll - 'US president: Who will you vote for' - has been configured to allow each computer to only vote once.

This is accomplished by the use of 'cookies' that identify computers that have already participated in the poll. Those who attempted to rig the online poll have managed to get around the restriction.

Nevertheless, malaysiakini can track such abuse and will take steps to block such attempts as well as to discount the 'extra' votes, so that the poll will fairly reflect the views of the website's readers.

Bush in the lead?

The poll, which kicked off on late Monday, was the idea of Erik Ossemig, an ex-US Army serviceman who felt voters other than Americans should have a say in the Nov 2 presidential elections.

He argued that the US leader who is going to occupy the White House for the next four years will have a major impact on the rest of the world.

Ossemig, who has been a Malaysian resident for 14 years, is offering his vote to readers of malaysiakini . When the poll closes on Oct 15, Ossemig will mark the top vote-getter on his own postal ballot paper.

The four-week poll gives readers the choice of voting for one of the three confirmed candidates in the keenly contested election - Bush (Republican) and challengers John Kerry (Democrats) and Ralph Nader (Independent).

Kerry was leading the online poll on the first day, but Bush 'overtook' the Democrat after multiple voting was detected earlier today.

Discounting the multiple votes, the results as of 2.44pm, Sept 22 are: Bush, 904 (32.09%), Kerry, 1,569 (55.70%) and Nader, 345 (12.25%) from a total votes of 2,817.

Malaysiakini will continue to remove multiple votes as and when they are detected.