Hordes of volunteers who love the Sullivan County town of Roscoe mobilized this week, armed themselves with computers and email addresses, and went to work voting four times a day in a World Fishing Network contest for "Ultimate Fishing Town USA." All that voting paid off last night, when Roscoe won the contest with over a quarter of a million votes, according to the Times Herald-Record:
The tiny hamlet erased a deficit of more than 10,000 votes to end with 272,257 votes, 2,197 more than Waddington, the St. Lawrence County town that was Roscoe's main competition.
"It was just wonderful," Elaine Fettig, president of the Roscoe-Rockland Chamber of Commerce, said as she stood in Riverside Park with a dozen volunteers 20 minutes after voting ended at 6 p.m. "This community is just fantastic."
Roscoe beat out another New York town, Waddington, by only a few thousand votes, although reports of the final tally of votes differ a bit this morning. Waddington is being a gracious loser, according to the Watertown Daily Times:
"Over a quarter of a million votes? That's awesome," Waddington Mayor Janet M. Otto-Cassada said. "With the Chamber of Commerce here in Waddington and the St. Lawrence County Chamber of Commerce, and all the people who volunteered their time to make this a reality, we really didn't lose. We won."
These contests are won with volunteers working around the clock to vote for others by proxy, both papers explain. Here's how it worked in Roscoe, the THR reports:
Hundreds of employees in the New York City and South Fallsburg offices of Rolling V Bus Co. spent Friday submitting votes on behalf of people at the network's contest page, said owner Phil Vallone. "Everybody was involved," he said. "And not only employees, but their family members."
The official winner of the contest will be announced on June 6, according to the contest website.
Photo submitted to the Ultimate Fishing Town contest by Kurt Huhner.
