TV and Telephone Voting

Television shows that take place over the course of an evening which are decided by telephone voting are frequently blighted by what I call the "I've just come in from the pub mob" and the "I've watched something else and then just flipped over for the end posse".

The problem
What happens is these groups of people both only see the end of the show and then, understandably, vote for one of the later candidates/acts/talents (CATs), because that's one of the ones they've seen. This gives the final CAT a significant advantage over everyone else and, indeed, depending on the country's pub culture and the other programmes on that evening with significant viewing shares, each CAT an advantage over all the ones who were on before them.

Solutions so far
There are measures designed to counteract this. One is having each CAT having to do something more than once. If, in a singing show with three CATs, each CAT has to sing twice, then you at least have CAT1 singing once after each of CAT3 and CAT2 has sung their first song (assuming a 1,2,3,1,2,3 order) - or you could have a different order like 1,2,3,3,2,1 to try to maximise fairness. Whatever you do though, you have one CAT who's on last and who catches the votes of the aforementioned mob and posse.

Another idea is to open the voting lines straight away, before any CATs have even been on stage. This is flawed insofar as it means that people who vote based on a performance have more time to vote for certain CATs whilst people who just vote based on prior sympathies can vote regardless of what the CATs actually do on the night.

So if we want a fair vote reflective of people's assessments of what the CATs have done during the show, this doesn't work. You could argue that being able to vote for CAT1 balances out the swing to CAT3 from the mob and posse, but having two terrible features in a system and hoping they approximately balance one another out is a bit like throwing a few nukes around and hoping more baddies than goodies die: neither scientific nor likely to work.

What you could do
My suggestion is to get people to register to vote. This would take place in the waffle that happens at the start of the show before any CATs have been on. This segment usually takes at least 15 minutes (on a standard Saturday evening format) and is ample time for people who are generally interesting in digging in for the evening to send a short text message (SMS) or ring up a number.

By registering they would make themselves (or anyone with the same phone number) eligible to vote during the voting phase, which would only begin after the last CAT's last performance. This seems technically straightforward to implement and would restrict voting to those people who have seen the whole show and so can make a fair decision. Clearly, some people might have some chips or something and miss one of the CATs, but you can imagine people's chip-eating habits to be varied enough for this to even itself out and not significantly (dis)advantage one CAT over another.

I don't really see many problems with this. You could, for example, easily adjust the price of calls to stop having to ring in twice hitting the voters' bank balances too much. It doesn't solve the fact that some certain audience sections (with some correlation with the kind of CAT they like) are more likely to take part in a phone vote than others, but that's true of all votes. At a parliamentary election, there are some sections of the electorate who would rather go down the pub than go cast their vote. And they automatically get underrepresented in the House of Commons.

The only real flaw I can see in this system is that it would probably lead to fewer votes coming in, which would mean less money being made. But if there has to be a victim for the sake of overall fairness, then you could find a worse one than television producers.

Einer von hier? Ganz nah dran.

Ich wohne seit Mai 2010 in Lichtenberg. Da ich Engländer bin, darf ich bei der Bundestagswahl nicht wählen. Ich werde aber den Wahlplakaten trotzdem ausgesetzt. Seit Sonntag hängt das Plakat vom Bundestagskandidaten Martin Pätzold (CDU) mehrfach vor dem Bahnhof in Lichtenberg. Der Slogan lautet: „Einer von hier. Ganz nah dran.“

Ein Tweet von Herrn Danny Freymark (CDU), Mitglied des Abgeordnetenhauses von Berlin, erklärt den Sinn des Slogans: „Er ist hier aufgewachsen, es wird verdeutlicht, dass er regional verwurzelt ist.“

Somit möchte sich also Dr. Pätzold von seiner Konkurrenz absetzen. Nur: Gesine Plötzsch (Linke) ist 1961 in Berlin-Lichtenberg geboren. Ebenfalls ist Erik Gührs (SPD) in Berlin geboren und (laut einem zum sofortigen Löschen vorgeschlagenen Wikipedia-Artikel) „im Bezirk Hohenschönhausen aufgewachsen“.

Pätzold, 1984 in Moskau geboren, „wohnt seit dem dritten Lebensjahr in Hohenschönhausen“ so Freymark. Auf Nachfrage, wie er dann, wie auf seiner Webseite behauptet wird, die deutsche Botschaftsschule in Moskau besucht haben könne, wird die Aussage revidiert: „also war er mal da und mal da“.

Ich habe kein Problem mit Menschen, die im Ausland geboren sind oder sogar im Ausland aufgewachsen sind. Beides bin ich auch. Es ist auch völlig normal, dass Menschen ihre Kindheit in mehreren Ländern verbringen. Es lässt sich aber schwer glaubhaft machen, dass Dr. Pätzolds „einer von hier“-Sein in irgendeiner Art und Weise verstärkter ist als das der anderen Kandidaten.

Also warum betont er diese halbe Wahrheit? Wenn es etwas Gutes wäre, „einer von hier“ zu sein, wäre es logischerweise weniger gut, einer zu sein, der nicht von hier ist. Ein Ausländer zum Beispiel. Kann es also sein, dass Pätzold & Co. eine bestimmte Gruppe unter den Lichtenberger Wählern ansprechen möchte? Eine, die 2011 schaffte, zwei Vertreter der NPD zum Bezirksverordneten zu wählen?

Ich kann es leider nicht ausschließen.

Deshalb fühle ich mich von dem Plakat etwas abgestoßen. Für Freymark sind diese Gefühle „völlig unverständlich“, aber ich würde hoffen, dass es deutsche Politiker gibt, die in der Lage sind, die fremdenfeindliche Wirkung solcher Aussagen nachzuvollziehen. Oder wenn sie doch beabsichtigt sind, dies wengistens einzugestehen.

Und eine Nebensache zum Schluss

Ganz nebenbei entdeckte ich heute ein Tweet von Freymark: „Peinliche #Piraten, hängen einen Tag zu früh die Plakate in Lichtenberg. War die Kalenderfunktion defekt oder sind die Regeln egal?!”

Einen Tag zu früh. Peinlich. Am 17.06. (vor gut 40 Tagen und 40 Nächten) nahm ich folgendes Bild auf:

Auch wenn der Slogan ein wenig besser ist, bleibt die Ähnlichkeit mit dem aktuellen CDU-Wahlplakat verblüffend:

Freymark klärt aber auf: „Dafür brauch[t] man im Übrigen keine Genehmigung, daher hat das eine mit dem anderen nichts zu tun.“

Alles klar. Die Anzeige auf der Werbeuhr verstößt doch gegen kein Gesetz. Dann liege ich wohl mit meiner Kritik falsch. Aber ganz nah dran.

Come Vote With Me

The voting system on Come Dine With Me is fundamentally flawed. The jury and the competitors consist of the same four/five people, depending on the series. Let’s say five for simplicity. Each person gives each of the others up to 10 points, giving each person a score out of 40. This means that the person who gives their competitors the fewest points gives themselves the best chance of winning.

This kind of vested interest is clearly at odds with any principle of fair competition or what the OSCE would call ‘free and fair elections’. Whilst at a UK parliamentary election candidates are also part of the electorate, each candidate effectively votes for themself so each candidate has 1 extra vote so it’s fair. 

You could quite easily make the scoring in Come Dine With Me fair, simply by adding the average of each person’s votes to their own total. So if someone votes 9,9,7,7 for their opponents, they get 8 points added on, and if someone votes 1,2,3,4 they get 2 and a half. This would also render an individual’s own interpretation of the scoring system irrelevant. By this I mean that one man’s 9 is another man’s 7 – this is a perfectly expected feature of the voting which currently punishes the generous, but which doesn’t matter under the proposed system. The only decisive factor would be the relative assessment by each competitor of each dinner.

It is indisputable that this system would be fairer and, to an extent, free up competitors to vote on each occasion solely based on their opinion of each dinner. There would still be some scope for tactical voting, as you may think that other people prefer a certain dinner and therefore vote lower to sabotage its creator's total. However, it would provide a clear improvement in terms of fairness and eliminate the all-too-common stinginess that blights our airwaves.

Of course, such a system won’t be introduced because it will certainly fall into the category of ‘too complicated’ and the British public would much rather have something they don’t have to think about than something fair, as evinced by the result of the AV referendum.