‘Fat Bear Week’ Hit By Voter-Fraud Attempt

On Tuesday, Oct. 11, interested parties will get to weigh in on the final voting for Fat Bear Week, an annual tournament competition between the brown bears of Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska. The popular online event asks people to observe just how chunky certain bears have become while storing up fat for a long winter hibernation, and, over a series of matchups, elect the one they believe to have made the more impressive gain in girth.

The National Park Service uses the March Madness-style bracket as a way to educate the public on how bears have adapted to a harsh environment, and what it takes for them to survive it. As you can see, it’s also a chance for everyone to cut loose and revel in the sheer bulk of these majestic creatures:

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As far as the internet goes, Fat Bear Week is one of the most wholesome, innocent traditions on offer. It should be a trusted and transparent process, without nefarious manipulation. Which is why it came as such a blow to learn that during Sunday’s semifinal round between roly-poly bear 435 (nicknamed Holly) and airplane-sized bear 747, someone had attempted to game the results. Katmai National Park announced the attempted election fraud on Twitter.

In an email to Rolling Stone, Amber Kraft, Interpretation and Education Program Manager for the NPS, offered more clarity on exactly what went down, and whether fat-bear democracy remains intact. She confirmed that the spam attack was apparently made in order to give Holly an unfair win, with the legitimate results showing the victory belonged to 747.

“747 was winning was leading in votes for the whole day and by quite a substantial amount,” Kraft says. “When there were just a few hours of voting left we noticed that 435 Holly received over 9,000 votes in a very short period of time.” It was the speediest and most significant comeback the NPS had seen in a fat bear face-off, and it immediately drew suspicion.

NPS partner and multimedia wildlife organization explore.org, Kraft explains, found the avalanche of new votes had been generated via “many fake email addresses coming from several IP address.” Filtering out the votes from those IPs confirmed that 747 had bested 435 — who nonetheless, to her credit, was 2019’s Fat Bear Week champion. On further review, none of the previous rounds bore signs of suspicious activity, and NPS has now added a captcha to its system “in order to create another barrier to stop fraudulent voting.”

Kraft says that whatever the result of these humorous rivalries between hefty ursines and their human fans, what’s important is that all the bears are winners. “Bears get fat to survive, and the health of Katmai’s ecosystem, as demonstrated by the sustained run of salmon, clean water and thriving flora and fauna, enables their survival,” she says. They don’t gain anything by triumphing in Fat Bear Week, Kraft notes — besides our better understanding of the role we have in protecting wild spaces and species.

“We hope that the awareness that Fat Bear Week brings will grow into caring and action in whatever way makes the most sense for each individual,” she adds. “It could look like talking about important issues with friends and family, cleaning up a watershed or volunteering with a conservation organization, or any number of other actions. Our friends group, the Katmai Conservancy, is the official nonprofit fundraising partner of Katmai. They are the third partner with us in Fat Bear Week and have a fundraising campaign they do in conjunction to the event.”

So, in sum, a close call, but crisis averted. Fat Bear Week remains a free, fair, and democratic institution, while the scheming individual(s) who nearly tarnished it with fake votes ought to be ashamed of what they’ve done. Just know that you’ll never rob we the people of our right to choose a favorite fat bear. Save your nefarious influence for the midterms. (Kidding.)

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