With a little more than six hours to go before voting closes on the second round Worst Company In America bout between Spirit Airlines and Ticketmaster, a source at Live Nation tells us that senior staff are encouraging employees to vote on the matchup.

The insider forwarded us an e-mail claiming to be from the office of the Ticketmaster CEO to staffers that includes this item:

#2 is a link [note: the link is to the voting page for the Spirit vs. Ticketmaster contest] I would like all 650 of you on this DL list to visit. This week’s match-up on the Consumerists is between TM and Spirit Airlines.Since they block too many votes from the same IP address, consider doing your voting from home or from your phone, iPad, etc. That would help some people who need to vote at work.

As many of you already know, Comcast tried to get its employees to vote for Charter in last year’s tournament. But unlike the Comcast attempt, which was posted as a directive on the home page of the company’s intranet and suggested that employees talk to people in IT to discuss getting around the IP-based roadblock, the Ticketmaster rallying cry is in the form of a friendly e-mail.

After all, we don’t want to discourage employees at any of the nominated companies from showing support for their employers (so long as it’s genuine). We do object to organized attempts at gaming the system just to make your company look less bad.

PS: Ticketmaster should really do its research if it thinks that 650 votes is enough to sway the poll, especially since it currently has around 80% of the vote.

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