The Logical Endgame of All-Star Fan Voting Has Been Realized, and It Is Disastrous

The Seattle Sounders, the breakout expansion team in MLS, is popular. Very popular. Lead the league in attendance popular. And, as it turns out, rig the entire fan voting process popular:↵↵⇥If not for Landon Donovan, Seattle Sounders FC would have a clean sweep↵⇥of the First XI for the MLS team in the 2009 MLS All-Star Game, at↵⇥least as the fans have called it thus far.
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↵⇥Sounders FC fans have embraced the expansion team with the best↵⇥attendance in the league and they’ve stuffed the ballot box in a big↵⇥way, increasing the number of Seattle players to 10 in the fans’ First↵⇥XI, up from nine last week and eight two weeks ago.↵↵The one detail about MLS voting that saves their All-Star Game from being an absolute farce is that the league, perhaps recognizing the danger in what a relatively small but devious group of people can do to voting (especially on the Internet, where “order” has become anathema), only count fan votes as 25% of the process; the rest comes from the other three voting blocs (players, owners/GMs, media).↵
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↵In this instance, as a matter of fact, the fans’ vociferous support may end up being ultimately deleterious to their cause; there’s now an extrinsic motivation for the other 75% of voters to actually sandbag the Sounders so as to counteract the fan voting.↵
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↵And that’s really what you want out of a fan-inclusive process, isn’t it? Something that can completely undermine the voting itself, where the All-Star Game needs to be “saved” from the fans it’s being held for. Mission accomplished, right?↵