… East High School is the best school in the area!
Except that the Reader’s ten-plus years of running a people’s choice awards issue didn’t have a category for best high school – thank goodness.
But the Trib does and its “Best of the Best” insert boasts that 59,404 votes determined the results. Now that’s not to mean that twice as many people voted for this popularity contest than will vote in the November 7th school board election. Hardly. They had about 185 categories so that any one person could have cast that many votes. If every voter in the survey had cast votes on all 185 categories each could have been decided by a mere 321 votes.
Of course, not everyone was very likely to cast a vote for the “Best chiropractor.” Who knows how many voted in that category at all.
Its incredibly obvious that the voting can be manipulated far more easily than Putin managed. Stuffed ballots would have been easy to pull off. Any Pizza place could have organized its fans and friends to do just that for the minutes of free publicity it would give them
As for East High “winning” – think about it. For the past twenty-five years East has been the biggest of three Duluth High Schools and currently has sixty percent more students than Denfeld. Furthermore, far more of them are likely to have parents who can afford to subscribe to the Trib. Winning for them was as easy to manage as my Dad’s intervention in the Washburn College May Day Queen vote. He was in Washburn’s Law school whose older students couldn’t have cared less about the undergraduate’s May Day festivities…except that his little sister, my Aunt Mary, was a contestant for her sorority. Someone had taken a picture of her in a fetching bathing suit and put it on a four by eight plywood board. My Dad simply had someone install it on the wall of the lawschool and all the lawyers-to-be fell over themselves to vote for the first time in Washburn’s May Day history.
But now its official. East High is the best high school in Duluth. Thanks Duluth News Tribune for frivolously and thoughtlessly interjecting more divisiveness in the Duluth Schools.
At least the Reader’s Best of the Northland Issue is a funky and tongue-in-cheek affair with off beat quotes from the people supporting their fiends or dissing their enemies. The Trib’s piece looks like slick, mindless, nonsense guaranteed only to get them more advertising dollars from the “winners.”
