bsh1

It was at this point that a third party contacted me informing me that Hammer was lying and that no such coordination had taken place. This third party requested that I maintain their anonymity--a request I have every intention of respecting. I judged this third party to be trustworthy, and was able to match parts of their story with Hammer's, further persuading me of the potential truthfulness of their account. Both parties, for instance, provided me with the same number of people in the group chat--an unlikely coincidence if they were not both in fact a part of said chat. This information was publicly disclosed by me in my announcement regarding the validity of Hammer's allegations.

Now, with credible testimonial evidence directly contradicting Hammer's allegations, I felt that it was even more necessary that I obtain evidence from Hammer in order to establish his probably guilt or innocence. I informed him that I needed a screenshot to verify Hammer's allegations. I said that he could redact any personally-identifying information from the image(s), so that no one's IRL identity or facebook profile was disclosed. Together with the visual evidence and the usernames, I could establish the truth of the matter by comparing those users' testimony to the visual evidence. At the very least, I would have needed just some DART usernames. But, as I noted, Hammer refused to provide me with even usernames. I repeatedly stressed to Hammer that in light of me receiving evidence contradicting his account, that I needed him to provide me with something which indicated his innocence.

Hammer eventually sent me an image that I am confident was fabricated. I am confident that it is fake for at least five reasons. First, none of the first page votes were solely for RM. Second, LordLuke, who cast the only one-off RM vote, has no known ties to or interaction with Hammer, whereas RM is one of the few people with which LordLuke does have established ties or known interactions. This suggests that the vote for RM was genuine and not prompted by Hammer. Third, LordLuke's vote was more than a vote for "just RM." While RM was his only user vote, he did take time to vote for threads, which suggests that his vote was more than a just an auto-vote for RM. Fourth, the anonymous third party searched for any RM vote solicitations and denied to me that there were any. Finally, and importantly, LordLuke himself has since denied being contacted via a Facebook group chat about voting for RM in the HOF election. He told me (quoting with permission): "But no, nobody told me to vote for RM. I voted for him because I like that sort of personality. I used to be a lot like that when I was 13. That kind of person who's always right, etc."

There were also a number of circumstantial factors at play. Known friends and associates of Hammer--namely, Thett3 and ResurgetExFavilla--both voted at roughly the same time Hammer did. If Hammer had in fact been coordinating the vote early in the process, it struck me as unlikely that all three of them would have voted essentially at the same time later in the process. Moreover, Hammer alleged that he was attempting to get RM inducted into the HOF, yet of those three, only Thett voted for RM. In fact, the only common vote among those three was Supa. This was at the same time, of course, that Wylted was actively campaigning for Supa's induction.

There was also a telling post from ResurgetExFavilla after the events which indicated to me that I had reached the correct conclusions. His post implied that had someone not snitched (i.e. my anonymous source), the ban would have been avoided. Snitching is distinct from lying or from setting someone up; it implies breaking a code of silence with truth. This indicated, of course, that my anonymous source had pointed me in the correct direction.

Finally, I reached out to Thett, who acknowledged that he was a member of the group chat in question, but denied any knowledge of any vote campaign. I explained to him that if Hammer were telling the truth, his ban would be reduced (this is true, his ban would have been reduced to match Wylted's). I then asked Thett to pass on any exonerating evidence he might encounter, to which he replied that (and I am paraphrasing): "examining the early votes, it doesn’t appear that Hammer was telling the truth in his post." Based on this remark, it seemed to me unlikely that the early RM voters were a part of the group chat in question.