I got this on email today, originally its from the Guardian..
Along with many other journalists and lawyers, I've been receiving emails urging me to add my name to an email petition calling on the Nigerian government to stop the execution by stoning of Amina Lawal, set for June 3. She was convicted of adultery by a sharia court last year, but her death sentence was postponed so that she could nurse the baby resulting from the relationship. The campaign to prevent the execution, organised by the Spanish branch of Amnesty International, has attracted several million signatures.
There's only one problem: the whole thing is based on an untruth. Lawal has not been sentenced to be executed on June 3, nor on any other date. She is still waiting for her appeal to come up before a local appeals court - the June 3 date is for that - and has other avenues of appeal thereafter.

Moreover, as the human rights organisation actually dealing with her case points out, every previous appeal against death by stoning for women in circumstances similar to Lawal's has succeeded. No such execution by stoning has actually been carried out in Nigeria.

It's a big mistake to make, confusing an appeal date with an execution date, and obviously the organisers of the email campaign have erred spectacularly. It is a shame that other human rights groups, and civil liberties law firms and barristers' chambers, were happy to act as recruiters for signatures without checking the facts, but I can't really blame them for assuming that the information they had been given by the originators of the campaign was correct.

The group Baobab for Women's Human Rights, which has issued a full explanation of the situation, argues that such a misguided, uninformed campaign, done without consulting the organisations who know what's really happening, risks being counterproductive. It can damage the credibility and efforts of local groups active in the same cause; it insults the legal system of the country involved; it angers local political forces, which could result in a backlash, causing sympathy to evaporate. A case is cited in which a Nigerian state governor brought forward a sentence of flogging just to demonstrate his contempt for international pressure.

The Baobab group pleads for more thought and fact-checking by campaign originators. That's a message relevant to more than Lawal's case.

I have seen online petitions before. It seems to me that it is most unlikely that they can have any validity whatever.

My reason is that it is not really possible to prevent a supporter of the petition from signing it ten, twenty, or even 100 or 1000 times under different names.

Let us see what steps might be taken to prevent this ?

1. Log IP numbers, and allow only one vote per ip number. Since dial-up connections (and some broadband) have dynamic ip numbers, all that is required is to redial the isp for each vote. And this would disenfranchise all the people on a local network except one.

2. Log email addresses, and see if the address exists. Easily defeated by creating numerour hotmail or yahoo accounts, or even by inventing them. Just about anything you can think of exists anyway - try to find a free identity and you will see this is the case.

3. Log email addresses and verify them by making each voter "register", receive a password, and then return again to actually vote. Tedious - many genuine people wouldn't bother - and a person who makes multiple email accounts can still cheat.

My conclusion is that no online vote has any validity or credibility at all unless perhaps it charges a tiny amount to each voters credit card, one vote per credit card. But what about people with no credit card?

So no online vote is worth anything at all. Just an exercise in naivety, wide open to massive rigging.

Or is there something I've missed ?

Women can have babies, to whoever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want, from the age of fifteen and FUCK all men, governments and oppressors who say otherwise...

Men are ALL jealous PUSSIES!

Death to men, freedom to women and children.