What was supposed to be a celebration of this year’s winning Park City cocktail and mocktail recipes has now become an investigation into who rigged the voting and how to prevent it from happening again.
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.
Read the full story at KPCW.org.
This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aim to inform readers across the state.