Nebraska's favorite bad soap opera of the moment took a juicy twist Friday, when officials announced the license plate contest had been compromised.

The real winner is, in fact, plate No. 1 - the one with the meadowlark and goldenrod.

The black-and-white gradient plate announced Tuesday as the winner by Gov. Dave Heineman has been dropped, due to newly discovered data showing the online vote was skewed by CollegeHumor.com.

The Web site posted a link to Nebraska's license plate survey May 7, asking users to vote for the "boring" No. 2 design, which won.

Earlier in the week, the state said votes from the site were "spread evenly" and results were valid despite the effort of College Humor.

Wrong.

"I now have evidence that shows it is clear that the site's malicious intent was realized," state Motor Vehicles Director Beverly Neth said Friday. "I regret this situation, particularly the conflicting information I received and that was passed along.

"However, I am taking responsibility for this situation, and I am here to make this right."

After the false plate design winner was announced Tuesday, news outlets questioned College Humor's influence.

By Thursday, Neth said, she believed there to be sufficient reason to review raw data from the survey. Nebraska Interactive, the vendor for the state's site, provided information that showed voters referred from CollegeHumor.com did, in fact, change the outcome - a lot.

The College Humor-referred votes broke down staggeringly in favor of plate No. 2, which spiked into the lead May 7, the day the site linked to the DMV site.

Plate No. 2 got 12,510 votes via the link, while No. 1 got 1,131. The remaining two plates each took in fewer than 1,000 votes from College Humor users.

Brent Hoffman, general manager for Nebraska Interactive, joined Neth Friday to apologize.

Initially, he said, all Nebraska Interactive and the DMV were monitoring was the aggregate voting tally.

"We did not monitor day-by-day voting results, which would have provided the necessary visibility that a third party had influenced the vote results during the peak days when unusually high traffic was being referred to the license plate voting site."

Officials had agreed in advance that every vote would count, no matter where it came from.

In hindsight, he said, Nebraska.gov should have started to review day-to-day vote tallies as soon as it learned a third party was trying to influence the vote.

Neth said CollegeHumor.com's prank does not raise security issues about the site, but said, "I certainly did not expect a site to go out and try to negatively affect the poll."

"We're talking about a Web site that thought it was funny to try to affect the poll to get its users to vote a certain way.

"It wasn't funny to me the moment I learned about it, and it's still not funny," she said. "I don't think maliciously interfering with an official government purpose is funny."

The winning design will be stamped onto 2.4 million manufactured plates by 2011.

Barring any other plot twists, of course.

Reach Micah Mertes at 473-7395 or mmertes@journalstar.com.