Instead of a spirited and friendly competition, the annual cocktail and mocktail contest turned into a digital debacle when organizers learned that one or more of the contestants may have cheated.
According to Ginger Wicks, the executive director of the Park City Restaurant Association which organizes the contest, the event usually celebrated for its creativity and community engagement will be declared invalid while they look into what happened.
They suspect someone devised a software program to generate emails, resulting in thousands of fake votes.
More than 200,000 votes were submitted. Historically about 5,000 votes are cast each year.
Voters used to have to purchase the cocktail to vote for it. Wicks said the competition morphed into an online contest over the years to get more participation.
“To run the contest for an entire month really gives us time to highlight all of the different cocktails, to give them exposure, whether it's in radio interviews or television interviews, and drive business to the participating restaurants, which ultimately, that's what the Park City Area Restaurant Association is here to do is to support our members,” Wicks said.
“So, the online format gives us that opportunity to do that,” she added.
Wicks said suspicion about vote validity came up last week when website managers noticed some discrepancies.
She said they won’t be revealing who may have played dirty. It will be up to the board of directors to decide whether those who cheated will be banned from future contests.
She’s just saddened something like this could happen.
“You know, we're a community here, and this is a community contest to support our amazing mixologists and that should be the spirit of this contest. Releasing who was involved in this is not in the best interests of our community or the spirit of this contest,” Wicks said.
John Concannon who founded and owns Park City Computer Guy said while unfortunate, scamming the system isn’t that hard to do.
“The software that was probably involved with this is also involved with Google indexing millions and millions and millions of websites,” Concannon said.
“So, when someone does a search for ‘cocktails and Park City’ they come up with some good results. Sometimes the programs are simple to create. And, as you can see, it can be very daunting to try to prevent that. It's possible and sometimes not that hard, especially with the right knowledge,” he said.
Wicks doesn’t know yet what they’ll need to do to protect the integrity of the contest, since it will involve a lot of money the organization doesn’t have.
“We'll have to do a deep dive into how we can create a fair voting system that meets the expectations of the participants,” she said.
Wicks emailed members of the restaurant association Wednesday night informing them of the decision not to award a winner this year because of the “confirmed instances of multiple participants hacking the voting system.”
An email from the Historic Park City Alliance sent to members including KPCW, Wednesday morning noted Main Street “is excited to have Palomino and Handle in the top three” of the contest.
Off Main Street establishments include Blind Dog, Cena, Goldener Hirsch, Grub Steak, Hearth and Hill, Kita, Red Tail Grill, Silver Star Cafe, Stein Eriksen Lodge and Tupelo.
KPCW reached out to other participants. One responded saying “if they cheat on this, they probably cheat on their wives and their taxes too.”
