Nickelodeon said that former VP Joe Biden was the winner of its Kids Pick the President poll, which had to fight off a bot-driven attempt to stuff the ballot box.
With 90,000 youngsters participating, Biden got 53% while the incumbent got 47%.
Nickelodeon’s guidelines call for one vote to be counted per household device, allowing multiple kids in a family to participate. But the network detected cheating on Oct. 21, when online forums began discussing flooding the Kids Pick the President site with fraudulent votes.
More than 130,000 bot-generated votes were detected and Nickelodeon used a voter certification tool to identify those votes and remove them.
“Though kids are not of an age to vote, Kids Pick the President is a platform where their voices do count, and they deserve to be heard. And just as kids value honesty and fairness, so do we at Nickelodeon. Therefore, out of respect for kids everywhere and in the spirit of civic responsibility, we present the name of the winner based on votes cast fairly and within our stated guidelines of one vote counted per household device,” the network said.
The “Kids’ Vote” results were revealed Tuesday night during a Nick News: Kids Pick the President special, hosted by Keke Palmer.
