The winner of a contest to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Seattle's iconic Space Needle, Nicole Commins' "trees" design has been atop the landmark since December.
It turns out, the design's win was courtesy of a hacker who fixed the contest. Awkward.
KIRO 7 investigative reporter Chris Halsne found strong evidence someone on the outside rigged the contest's online voting system to wrongly give the "Trees" design the most votes. According to the article, the actual winner probably should have been Ryan "Henry" Ward's "Deep Blue Sea" design, which featured fish circling the roof.
Space Needle reps were resistant to the idea that their contest results were compromised but later admitted as such after being presented with the evidence. KIRO then tracked down an Amazon employee, Aaron Miller, who apparently bragged about rigging the contest on message boards. It is assumed that Commins had no role in the rigged vote.
The Space Needle apparently has no plans to change the roof, which is expected to be up through June. Do you think that Ward's design should be the replacement or should we just go back to our plain, vanilla Space Needle roof ways?
· Space Needle Going Evergreen [Curbed Seattle]
· Space Needle lets hackers pick contest winner [KIRO]
· Click it and Pick It: What Design Should Top the Space Needle? [Curbed Seattle]