Simon O model contest starts from scratch after vote fraud.
Simon O, the Austrian designer renowned for exquisite latex garments coveted by rubber lovers the world over, is currently doing his best to recover from a nasty bout of unintended consequences.
Nominations for the contest opened on February 20, and when registrations closed on April 4, public voting began — and so did Simon’s problems.
It wasn’t just that fetish people found themselves inundated by models begging for their votes on social media — a spectacle which some people are happy to go along with, but which others find rather demeaning.
It was more that after the contest had been trundling along for a while, the folk at the Vienna-based label began to notice some rather suspicious voting patterns.
After the contest had been trundling along for a while, the folk at the Vienna-based label began to notice some rather suspicious voting patterns
And eventually, on April 23, the designer found himself obliged to announce that the voting (which had already produced the finalists) was being scrapped owing to “a variety of abuse and voting fraud”.
He cited examples including models being e-mailed with offers to buy votes, and evidence of fans writing programs that “accessed our site and voting system”.
As a result of this fraudulent activity, contestants’ voting totals have been reset to zero “to give every model a fair chance”, using a new, improved voting system that is “strong and secure”.
Unsurprisingly this announcement created dismay and outrage among contestants and supporters whose legitimate efforts had been nullified and who faced the prospect of having to start from scratch to get enough votes to reach the finals a second time.
But there are those who claim that this whole farrago could have been avoided had the latex label implemented secure voting software in the first place and managed the whole process better from the start.
By apparently not doing so in an age when online vote-fiddling is rife, the designer stands accused at the very least of a degree of naivety that genuine participants and fans may or may not find it possible to forgive.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale of accusations, one unidentified correspondent particularly stands out. For this person, we deduce, forgiveness is almost certainly not an option.
Answering a missive from this individual that was full of quasi-legal bluster, the designer commented calmly: “We are a serious company for 20 years. We expect the same from others when it comes to a contest.”
“You had a chance to fix the contest,” came the reply, “but you just replaced one type of voter fraud with another.
“As for being in business for 20 years, Adolf Hitler was in power in Germany for 22-plus years, and he was from Austria!”
So every cloud does have a silver lining. Simon O can now claim to have prompted a brand new manifestation of Godwin’s Law, which states that if an online discussion goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.
And fortunately, a corollary of the same law adds that once such a comparison is made, the discussion is finished, and whoever mentioned Hitler has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.
Tags: Clothing, Competitions, Latex, Models