Charities Upset Over Chase Facebook Contest
ssv03 writes "The New York Times is reporting that Chase Community Giving of Chase Bank recently held a contest on Facebook in which users were encouraged to vote for their favorite charities. At the end of the contest, the 100 charities with the most votes would win $25,000 and advance to the next round to have a chance to win $1 million. Initially, the vote counts for each organization were made public, but two days before voting ended they were hidden, and the final totals have still not been released. While Chase had no official leader board during the voting, several organizations were keeping track of projected winners. Those projections were almost identical to the final results, yet several organizations including Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), Marijuana Policy Project and several anti-abortion groups were not finalists. They had been performing very well (some within the top 20) until the vote counters were removed. Chase Bank has so far refused to discuss the issue with the organizations. SSDP has spoken out in a press release (PDF) and is calling for a boycott."
Even if most people support marijuana law reform, they aren't actually proponents, just not opponents. In both the Obama survey and the Facebook survey, results that seem to show that marijuana law reform has a lot of proponents are skewed because the style of survey trends towards over-representing the young and the vocal. It still remains that most Americans just don't care enough for anything to come of it.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.