Rampant election fraud rocks MLS mascot voting

Over the past few weeks, MLS has been running a mascot bracket on their website to determine the best mascot in MLS. Of course, the ultimate purpose of such a poll is highly questionable because, as we all know, Cozmo is the best mascot in sports, and this is something which simply can not be disputed.

The powers that be, however, obviously felt that he was getting too big for his britches, and conspired to bring everyone's favorite taco loving alien down.

I first noticed a problem when Cozmo was up pitted against Rapids Man is the quarter final. When I first voted for Cozmo, he was up by a whopping  14%. When I went back to vote again minutes later, he was down by 5%. Cozmo eventually went on to win, but the fluctuations were suspicious.

It gave me a bad feeling going in Cozmo's semi-final head to head with Orlando City's mascot, Kingston, and my fears were realized on the day when Cozmo ended up losing the vote by less than a percentage point.

While the powers that be will tell you that Cozmo lost the election fair and square, the math simply doesn't add up. 100% of the 5 people who participated in my exit poll voted for Cozmo. 100%! So how the heck did he only get 49.8% of the vote?

The answer, ladies and gentleman, is an ugly one.

Alexander Hamilton once described voting as an "incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right," and I'm sure that he would be shocked and appalled by what is happening today in our mascot elections.

Take the case of Martha Stanton. Martha is 93 years old and has been voting in mascot elections her entire life. "I just love Cozmo" she told me, proudly displaying a sweater she made with Cozmo eating a taco neatly crocheted on the front.

But when dear sweet Martha showed up to vote for Cozmo, she was told the voting had already ended. Martha, it seemed, had fallen victim to an underhanded mailer from the Kingston campaign which claimed the election had been postponed till Monday. "It was devastating" she lamented. "And here I thought lions were supposed to be noble creatures."

And the voting irregularities did not end there. Many voters who showed up on the day had to wait in line for 5 hours just to cast their vote.

"Lucky for me, I had the day off so I had the time to power through it, but  I saw dozens of people abandon the line," one voter told me. "I waited in line for 2 hours" another man told me "but I had to cut out to catch the Lakers game. We have to cherish these final few losses with Kobe while we still can."

But even with so many voters turned away from the polls, it's still unthinkable to imagine how Cozmo could lose this election. Nothing about the situation made a lick of sense until I was contacted by a hacker going by the name Max0r.

"Yeah, I basically flipped the election for the lulz," he bragged. "It was easy, too. I root-kitted the mainframe using an sql exploit to mass ping their database and insert spoof code on the back end of their firewall " he  went on to explain over Skype before his mother called him for dinner.

It all began to make sense.

Voter suppression, hacking... a third thing I'm sure exists but I didn't find evidence for-- as you can see, the conspiracy to take down Cozmo ran deep, and, although the succeeded in their efforts, defrauding the American people in the process, they've forgotten one little thing.-- the constitution.

"Government are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

In other words, this fraudulent result holds no power because it is not the will of the people. MLS can claim some other mascot is the top dog all they want, but said title means absolutely nothing without the consent of the people. And, as we all know, the people are behind Cozmo!