I agree. There is no question that he participated in fixing the online poll. They are not that hard to manipulate if you examine the code and understand what makes them tick. Even IP regulated polls can be subverted by using more complex proxy arrays to appear to be voting from a different location each time.

Also, with the Casting Contest, the vote was extremely divided early on so it did not take a lot of cheating to move forward. With such a large field at the start, you could just pump in a thousand votes and that would move you right to the the top and into the next round.

MTV has come a long way with their polling systems in the last year, but they are still quite vulnerable. If they were serious about getting accurate samples they would be using entirely different voting technologies. For such a demographically youth bound channel, they are very slow to adopt new web technologies and when they do they choose the wrong ones (e.g. their disaster of a flash site.)