Trust is an elusive quantity at the best of times. Add in the anonymity of the Internet and it becomes even rarer.

Case in point. The NEW Covey Awards is a site where people can vote of their favorite book covers. A recent blog post about the awards told people how to cheat the poll and ’stuff the ballot box’.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one to find this offensive as the blogger posted a subsequent blog entry about how to make online polls ‘Stuff Proof’. One of the points raised by the blogger was the following:

It annoys me that these polls have nothing to do with quality, but everything to do with how many people you know and how easy it is to spoof the poll.

I agree with the point regarding polls in general but apart from ’spoofing the poll’ there’s not much anyone can do about it, except to figure out a way to make it work for you.

Which is where The NEW Covey Awards comes in.

The goal of The NEW Covey Awards is to recognize the most eye-catching Cover Art, the covers that would make you stop and pick up the novel for a closer look. It is also a forum that provides additional exposure for new authors.

I think the last line is the key here - ‘a forum that provides additional exposure for new authors’. If one of the covers entered in The NEW Covey Awards is by a popular author, voting for that author will of course dominate the voting process. However that author has submitted 1 cover out of the 30 on the site. That means that 29 other authors are benefiting from the popularity of that author. Even if there is a cover that is more deserving of the award, it doesn’t mean that the author or cover has ‘lost’. On the contrary, the author has benefited from the added exposure of having their cover listed on the site. The author can also resubmit their cover in another month if they wish.

The way I see it, it is a win-win proposition but only if you can trust the results.  ‘Spoofing the poll’ benefits nobody. If people feel the results can be cheated then the site will get less traffic, fewer authors and artists will submit their covers, and everyone will lose.

So yes, trust is an elusive quantity, but if you don’t have trust as your starting point, you’ve already lost.