‘Ballots have been stuffed’: voting scandal rocks Alaska’s fat bear contest

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/11/alaska-fat-bear-week-voting-scandal

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Katmai national park, which runs Fat Bear Week, forced to discount votes after irregularities in semi-finals discovered

A contest to determine the fattest bear in southern Alaska has been rocked by scandal, after organizers said a ballot box had been “stuffed” in favor of a brown bear called Holly.

Katmai national park, which runs Fat Bear Week, a knockout-style online competition that allows people to vote on which brown bears have gained the most weight between summer and fall, said it had discovered irregularities in voting over the weekend.

Bear 435, also known as Holly, had initially appeared to triumph over Bear 747 in the contest’s semi-finals, but an investigation found that Holly had been propelled to victory after she received 9,000 votes in a short space of time.

“Like bears stuff their face with fish, our ballot box, too, has been stuffed,” Katmai national park tweeted.

“It appears someone has decided to spam the Fat Bear Week poll, but fortunately it is easy for us to tell which votes are fraudulent. We have discarded the fake votes, and today’s official totals are: 747: 37,940; 435: 30,430.”

Fat Bear Week has become globally popular since the competition began in 2014. Katmai park rangers select 12 bears and provide two photos of the animals, one taken in mid-July and the other taken in early-September.

During this period bears eat a considerable amount of food – largely salmon – as they gain weight before hibernating over winter. Brown bears can increase their body weight by 50% during this time, and according to National Geographic Kids, a bear “may chow down on 90 pounds of food each day”.

The park provides background information on each of the competitors, which allows voters to consider factors beyond the mere fatness of the bears.

Holly, who was first identified by park officials in 2001, has reared several litters of cubs, according to Explore.org, and even adopted a cub in 2014. Holly was the 2019 Fat Bear Week champion, but there has been no suggestion of any impropriety in that vote.

Bear 747 has apparently not been given a name, but Explore.org notes that the large male bear “shares an identification number with a jet airplane”.

747, a “skilled and efficient angler who is found fishing most often in the jacuzzi or near the far pool of Brooks Falls”, is Katmai’s most dominant bear and was the 2020 Fat Bear Week champion.

After the re-tally, 747 advanced to the final of Fat Bear Week, where he is pitted against Bear 901, “a medium-small yet quickly growing adult female”. 901 is about six and a half years old – a brown bear’s average lifespan in the wild is 25 years – and fishes throughout the Brooks River, where she is “sometimes is keen to defend her fishing spots from other bears”, according to her bio.

Voting in the final opens at 8am Alaska time (noon ET) on Tuesday, and the 2022 Fat Bear Week champion should be announced on Wednesday.