WITH lolling tongues, threadbare coats and crooked noses aplenty, the World’s Ugliest Dog competition was always going to be a fleas-and-all affair. But then things got even uglier.

After weeks of online polling the championship was hit by a vote-tampering scandal that has left its contestants and fans in an uproar.

The trouble began when tens of thousands of votes that had been cast over the internet for Victoria, a half-blind greyhound described as having a face and body only a mother could love, disappeared overnight from the competition’s website.

Two days later the same thing happened to Pee Wee Martini, a Chinese crested mix whose drunken features and Mohawk hairdo made him a dog to watch — or, at least, to glance at in amazement.

When, the next week, officials discovered that the votes for two more dogs, Munchkin and Rascal, had been turned back to zero, they were forced to call a new election.

“The top four leaders were each missing around 35,000 votes. Clearly there was something very suspicious going on,” Vicki DeArmon, the California-based organiser of the event, said yesterday. “We were getting angry e-mails from owners and fans demanding to know what had happened. People were quite steamed up. There was a lot of finger-pointing — and paw-pointing.”

The online theft temporarily propelled Lucille Bald, a contestant with one jutting tooth, neck wrinkles, an unruly mane and an Elvis quiff, into the lead. When it emerged that Lucille, of Florida, had been stripped of the title of Orlando’s Ugliest Dog three years earlier after being unmasked as a ringer from the nearby city of Cocoa, doubts about integrity mounted. Andrea Potts, her owner, has protested innocence. “My dog does not have the mental capacity to hack into a computer system,” she told the Orlando Sentinel. The World’s Ugliest Dog competition has been held for 18 years as part of the Sonoma-Marin summer fair in California. It draws four-legged freaks from around the country, some of them “so ugly that God couldn’t figure out where to put the tail”, according to Brent Farris, the compere of the contest.

The title had been held for the past three years by Sam, from California, whose devilish bad looks earned him global notoriety. He died in November, opening up the competition to a new generation of canine curiosities.

Security on the World’s Ugliest Dog website has been enhanced. Despite all the shenanigans, the ultimate winner will be decided not by the popular vote but by a panel of judges next month. Even so, said Mrs DeArmon, the prestige of being the people’s choice is a sought-after honour. “It’s about fame and glory,” she said.

Times Recommends

• Experts baffled by vanishing sea lions
• CIA caught in a dirty and secretive war
• Double life of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab