Hundreds of Greater Cincinnati kids are using a Web site to vote on the ugliest, fattest and most promiscuous people at their schools.

        The site, voteforfun.com, allows youngsters across the country to create online “elections.” Classmates log on, find questions related to their schools and register their votes.

Some comments on Voteforfun.com are cruel attacks on specific students. | ZOOM |

        As of Friday, the site listed 1,460 elections created by young people here. In interviews with The Enquirer, many said they log on only at home, because the site is blocked from school computers.

        Election topics are often positive, such as “Who's the coolest dude at Moeller?” But others contain cruel or sexually explicit comments directed at specific students.

        There are elections to decide which girls stuff their bras. There are questions such as, “Who thinks (name deleted) is a nasty freak?”

        Students from Norwood Middle School voted on whom they wanted to beat up in the sixth grade. Kids at Deer Park Junior High were asked if they hated cheerleaders, and 86 votes endorsed the answer, “Death to all cheerleaders!” An additional 16 named a particular girl.

        “There's been a lot of stuff about me, and I don't like it all,” says Jessica Loth, 11, of Deer Park's Amity Elementary School. “I don't go on there anymore. I just think it's mean to everybody.”

        Administrators in Deer Park and Norwood said they weren't familiar with the site. When they tried to access it from school computers, they discovered they could not, they said.

        Nevertheless, “I'm very concerned,” says Sharon Freyhof, assistant principal at Norwood Middle School. Rumor-spreading and name-calling “is just a really ugly part of growing up. This is definitely making it worse, because you don't have to have the person right there to spread the rumor.”

        Voteforfun.com was created in 1999 by educators in Dublin, Ohio. They had already launched another site, mockelections.com, as a tool for teachers covering the 2000 presidential election. When kids expressed interest in setting up their own votes, the companion site was born, says Jim Hull, chairman of Mockelections.com Inc.

        “(Kids) love it,” he says. “They go there, and they stay on it for 30 minutes a night.”

        They're not supposed to say anything mean or profane, Mr. Hull says, but he acknowledges that some do. The system primarily relies on users to complain, because the site gets about 700 new elections a day, which is a difficult number to screen, he says. When people send negative feedback about an election, it's immediately deleted.

        The site isn't profitable yet, Mr. Hull says. He and his partners are maintaining it as an investment for the future, when advertisers will be eager to reach the adolescent market, he says.

        Technical updates this fall should cut down on problems, he says. The screening mechanism will be improved to better detect objectionable items. Users will receive feedback by e-mail when their elections draw complaints, and if that happens frequently, the service will no longer be free to them, Mr. Hull says.

        He acknowledges that the Web site creates the opportunity for a new type of bullying. On the other hand, alert adults can use the site to understand what's really going on with kids, he says.

        “Parents have an easier time monitoring this kind of bullying than any other type,” he says.

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