We Won!

If you regularly read this blog or are my Facebook (or real life) friend, you know that we recently entered a contest to win a year supply of diapers.  http://youandmeandourpreciousthree.blogspot.com/2014/05/vote-for-us.html

At the time, I didn't really think there was a chance of us winning.  I mean, I knew my babies really were the cutest babies but when it comes to contests like that where the winner is just the person with the most votes, it's really just a popularity contest.  Despite that, I did my best to get all my friends, family, and multiples groups to pull together to help me out.  I was so impressed with the amount of support we got from everyone.  Not only did lots of our friends and family vote, but they also shared the link on their pages to try and get votes from their friends as well.

On Friday, May 23rd KMBC Channel 9 News contacted us saying they wanted to do an interview and air our story to help us win.  http://youandmeandourpreciousthree.blogspot.com/2014/05/kmbc-channel-9-news-interview.html

Prior to the story airing, we were in the lead with just over 800 votes.  Within 24 hours of the story airing, we had gotten 350 more votes.  Surely we were going to win...right?  Well, maybe not.  The second place girl seemed to get a large surge of votes whenever we'd take the lead.  When we got those 350 votes after the news story was aired, she miraculously then got 400 votes in a matter of hours to take our lead.  Things were looking suspicious.

Soon people were pointing out red flags to me.  First off, I didn't realize you could track where the votes were coming from.  Someone directed me to this, which shows the distribution of votes for this girl.  https://bitly.com/QUBK1z+.  As you can see a majority of her votes are from Bangladesh and a very small percentage of them were linked from Facebook.  You could also see when she got her votes (hour by hour) and there were a number of times that she got very large amounts of votes in a very small frame of time.  It seemed pretty questionable.  I went to look at my vote distribution and it made a lot more sense. https://bitly.com/1mzP8EA+ .

Another friend pointed out to me that if you went to her profile page, her "About" section was filled with Vote Exchange groups.  I never even knew things like that existed before this contest.  Apparently you can exchange votes and even buy votes!  It was obvious from this girl's profile that she does contests like this often.

The third indicator that things were sketchy with this girl was that her photo had very little "likes" compared to how many votes she was getting.  In the end, we had over 2,000 votes, but over 3,000 likes.  She had nearly 3,000 votes but only 330 likes.  

Soon it was obvious to everyone that this girl was cheating.  And I was getting nervous.  What if she ended up winning and getting the prize over me?  It sucks not to win something, but to lose to someone who is playing dishonestly makes it that much harder to swallow.  I had friends contact the sponsor of the company to make them aware of what was going on.  They replied saying they were going to do voting audits on the contestants to make sure their votes were legit.  This made me feel better, but I was still nervous.

In the end, at 10:59 on Saturday, May 31st when the contest ended, I ended up with 2,292 votes.  The other girl had 2,628...almost 1,000 of which were obtained dishonestly in the last 24 hours of the contest.  I was bummed that we didn't end up with the most votes but was kind of holding out hope that the sponsor would disqualify the other girl and name me the winner.

The contest rules stated that the winner would be notified by email.  Those next couple days I checked my email constantly.  When I didn't see anything all day Sunday or Monday, I was convinced the other girl won.  And I was pretty bummed about it.  We really needed those diapers.  And we played fair.  It just wasn't right for her to win.

But then on Tuesday afternoon, I got this email:

My niece Monica was staying with us at the time, and I literally started screaming and jumping up and down.  I told all most closest friends and family right away and then the next day when I had had time to wrap my head around it, I got to post this on Facebook:

I know you all (like me) have been very eager for the winner of the diaper contest to be announced. As you probably know, we didn't end up with the most votes at the end of the contest due to the first place girl using questionable and dishonest voting tactics. Fortunately, LuckyVitamin.com doesn't condone that type of behavior and we were just notified that we are in fact the WINNERS of a year supply of diapers! I can't begin to express how grateful James Asher and I are to our friends, family, multiples community, Matthew DeSarle & KMBC 9 News Kansas City, and even people we don't know who supported us. It was so awesome to see everyone pull together to help our family. Thank you so much!

We ended up having 246 people "like" that status update and 17 people share it with their friends.  This whole thing has been an awesome experience.  Yes, we're thrilled about the prize...enough diapers and wipes to cover our babies' butts for 4 months (a year supply doesn't last as long when you have three).  It's a dream come true!  But what was even cooler was seeing everyone we know (and lots of people we don't know) come together to help out our family.  I wish I had a way of finding out exactly how many times our link was shared.  It was surely hundreds of times.  We are so very grateful for the support we've seen throughout all this.  It will be a fun story to share with our boys down the road.