Time magazine is taking heat because Adolf Hitler ranks third in an online tally that invites the public to rank the most influential people of the century.
Editors acknowledge the tally is unscientific and allows people to vote more than once.
The results will be only one factor influencing Time's pick for Person of the Century next month. But Time has received hundreds of complaints from readers and Web users. Elvis Presley is running first, followed by slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose ranking partly resulted from an anti-Hitler campaign. Eileen Gleimer, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., understands that Time's definition of influential includes both good and bad contributions. After all, Hitler was Time's Man of the Year in 1938.