NORMAL - A new online voting system was in place Friday to help name the new Normal pro baseball team, a response to security flaws that failed to protect against voter fraud during the initial vote.

"Our information technology team is certain that tampering has occurred," Steve Malliet, president of Normal Professional Baseball, said of this week's online voting.

Votes are still taken at www.normalbaseball.com. Voting began Friday and will extend through May 3, the team said Friday. A decision on the team's name will be announced May 18. Team owners retain the final naming authority.

The new system requires voters to enter a desired team name, voter's name, e-mail address, street address, city, state and zip code. The page says "One Vote Per Person Please."

A "thanks" message then pops up, but the vote is screened for authenticity by the team's IT staff before it's added to the total. Malliet said Friday that the IT staff will look for irregularities and then perhaps check the validity of a phone number or e-mail address.

"There's no fool-proof way of doing this, but we think this is a secure way of doing this," he said of the "labor intensive" process.

Unlike the former vote system, the results will not be visible in real time. Since they are reviewed, votes will periodically be added to the results, which will be then displayed.

New selections

In addition, Malliet announced that the name NightHawks has been withdrawn as a choice for the team, which will begin play in 2010 at a stadium under construction at Heartland Community College.

"I am grateful to the good people of Normal Community West High School and others in the community for letting us know that Night Hawk is a position of responsibility in the Ku Klux Klan," Malliet said.

"Despite the name's popularity in our original poll a few weeks ago, Nighthawks will be scratched off our list."

In its place, team owners are offering two other names. The Normal Fellers honors Jesse Fell, the founder of Normal, while the name "Fellers" offers the connotation of a "regular guy."

The other added option is the Normal CamelBacks, which recognizes the historic bridge that arches over Constitution Trail.

Voters will also be able to select from the three holdover choices: the Nutz, the CornBelters and the Coal Bears (pronounced Cole-Bears).

Unfair to Coal Bears?

Malliet said Friday that around 1,000,000 votes from the original system were tossed out.

The Coal Bears - feeding off the frenzy of Comedy Central TV show host Stephen Colbert- had 95 percent of the votes Tuesday morning (day 2).

But the Nutz came back strong, leading the contest with 78 percent of the votes to the Coal Bears' 16 percent by midday Thursday.

Local Web chatter, led by the www.normalcoalbears.com site, accused team officials of rigging the contest against the Coal Bears, pointing to the massive vote swing.

Malliet and team consultant Mike Thiessen denied Thursday that the poll had been restarted or otherwise messed with by team officials.

Malliet and Thiessen said it's hard to believe so many individuals would vote, suggesting users found a way to vote multiple times, causing the large vote fluctuations.

"We think that somebody was not following voting procedures," Thiessen said Thursday. "We would love to admit that there were 700,000 or 800,000 people voting, but to use a pun, that's just not normal."

The faux-arrogant Colbert and fans of his TV show, "The Colbert Report," have taken over online naming contests before. Most recently, NASA announced it would name a treadmill for him after write-in votes almost caused an entire room on the international space station to be named after the comedian.

Domain names

The normalcoalbears.com site also alleges favoritism toward the Nutz name by team officials, pointing to a domain registration for www.normalnutz.com by Thiessen on March 20 - days before the fan name-submission process started.

Malliet said Friday that the domain was registered because it was clear early on that it would be a popular choice, with the local tie to the Beer Nuts company and that nuts are a favorite snack at ballparks.

(Other domain names, such as www.normalnighthawks.com, were registered in April.)

He said the team met with officials from Beer Nuts about six months ago about the naming, but "it really has gone nowhere."

In light of the contest, "Now would be a good time to request a meeting," he said. "We'd love to talk to them."

A message left for Beer Nuts managing director Jim Shirk was not immediately returned.

On the Web:

http://www.normalbaseball.com/home