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When Vote Counting Goes Bad
ZipK writes "Television singing competition The Voice disclosed on Wednesday 'inconsistencies' with the tallying of on-line and SMS-based voting. Although host Carson Daly claimed the show wanted to be 'completely upfront,' the explanation from their third-party vote counter, Telescope, was anything but transparent. In particular, Telescope claims that disregarding all on-line and SMS-based voting for the two nights in question left no impact on the final results, but they haven't provided any detail of the 'inconsistency' or their ability to predict a complete lack of impact. Sure, it's only The Voice; but tomorrow it could be American Idol, and by next month, America's Got Talent."
Well, admittedly, I don't care about the reality shows.
But since there are laws about how you have to handle contests and the like, they need to really be able to prove that ignoring those votes had no effect on the outcome, or they could open themselves up for lawsuits.
Basically they'd have to show that the votes they ignored occurred in exactly the same distributions as the other voting methods.
And, since there's potentially a cost with voting, I have no idea if that even further mires things in.
I think they really do need to be able to explain this, and demonstrate that it didn't affect any outcomes. And if you've got several million people watching and voting, if they suddenly find out their voting is being ignored, will they keep watching?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.