Suspected Bot Activity Detected & Mitigated in New Salina311 Approval Ratings

Yesterday, Salina311 launched a new feature called Approval Ratings, a community tool that lets readers share whether they approve or disapprove of local officials, organizations, and public entities.

The goal is simple: create a running snapshot of public sentiment over time. Unlike a one-time poll, Approval Ratings are designed to track changes month by month.

After launch, the early voting followed patterns based on normal user activity. However, late last night, Salina311 detected unusual voting activity that occurred in two separate waves.

In several cases, thousands of votes were submitted within very short windows of time, often within the same minute, and many of those votes moved sharply in one specific direction across multiple ratings. 

The fraudulent voting patterns were associated with increased approval votes for City of Salina Officials, disapproval votes for City Commissioner Doug Rempp, and disapproval votes for Saline County Officials.

These votes were flagged by the built in fraud-detection system so the issue was resolved, but in order to further protect the integrity of the feature, Salina311 has now updated Approval Ratings so that users must be logged in before casting a vote. This change is intended to make the results more reliable and further reduce the chance of manipulation.

Approval Ratings is brand new, and like any new civic engagement tool, we expected to learn and improve quickly after launch. We appreciate the readers who participated in good faith.

Salina311 will continue monitoring the feature and may make additional changes as needed to keep the results useful, fair, and transparent.

The purpose of Approval Ratings is not to produce a perfect scientific survey. It is meant to give the community a visible, ongoing way to express sentiment and track how that sentiment changes over time.

We’ll keep improving it as the community uses it.

Click Here To View The Approval Ratings