Obviously, I have no idea of the process Shane, except for a few things that went reported after Mundy was announced which make the details of Hardie's claim laughable, and he hasn't persued it since even though he's had people like Bond and Prior and Rosich on the radio to put his claim to.
They brought in someone from group known as "Leading Teams" for the vote so I guess if you believe the general gist of it, then they'd also have been involved, which would seem an unnecessary complication.
What was reported a couple of times, was that each player read out their 5,4,3,2,1 vote in front of the team, so there's that part which doesn't really fit into the story for a start. There's some unexplained details, like for example, whether there's just one vote for the leadership group, or if there's firstly a vote for the leadership group, then a vote for captain.
But if you were that adamant that you wanted a certain player as captain you wouldn't you just say we're doing it this way this year and Fyfe is going to be captain. Going by the Dockerland poll prior to the count, there was no certainty Fyfe was a shoe-in, so you wouldn't expect that they would have taken it for granted that Fyfe would be voted in, even more so since he was still in rehab and training separately from the group in the period when the vote was taken.
A just as plausible explanation is that if, and that's a big "if", but if there may have been a partial mix up in the count along the way, and someone who Hardie says is "not in Fremantle but around the place...a bit" has heard about it and told and has come up with a kind of conspiracy theory explanation involving a lot of conclusion jump. The bona-fide that Hardie (who lives in Melbourne) gives, is that he has no reason not the believe the person who told him.
