• by May 4, 2007

A CosmoGIRL! contest for serious young female filmmakers ran into a serious case of online vote tampering recently, leading Susan Schulz, editor in chief of the Hearst publication, to cancel the voting and call on the year-old Hearst Digital Media to develop a new tool that's "foolproof and bulletproof."

According to Schulz, although visitors to the contest page at cosmogirl.com were only allowed to vote once a day, members of her young audience apparently figured out a way to automatically remove cookie scripts on a continuous basis "so the computer doesn't know you voted."

The fraud was discovered about a week into the two-week voting period when, following up on tips from a girl in Asia and the father of one of the contestants, cosmogirl.com determined that "the number of unique users was far below the number of votes."

After consulting with Hearst's legal department, Schulz took the voting off the Web site, replacing it with a statement about the tampering.

Schulz said Hearst Digital Media is working on a system that will do away with ongoing vote tallies, because "one way to prevent this is not to let the users see the (partial) results."

Three finalists and their social issue films were vying to win the contest, which is co-sponsored by CosmoGIRL! and Take Action Hollywood!, a non-profit dedicated to spurring the creation of films that promote awareness of social issues.

Choosing the winner has now shifted directly to a final celebrity trio of judges--Maria Menounos, actress, filmmaker and TV correspondent, who is executive director of Take Action Hollywood!; video and film producer Brett Ratner; and Fantastic Four director Tim Story. The winning film will be revealed in the August issue of CosmoGIRL!, with the winning filmmaker receiving $10,000.

Schulz stressed that she's committed to a second year for the contest despite the "technological blip." Although the magazine has done contests since its launch in 2000, the shift to online "opens them up to more people, but makes you more vulnerable. You need to dot every 'i' and cross every 't.'"