Nov 16 2008
Reality TV talent quests - a solution
At the moment X Factor and other reality tv talent shows will always be open to accusations of rigging the voting process or even fixing the results. Especially when people say they could not get through on phone lines to make their vote.
Think of the Olympics. When a sprinter comes last, but is only tenths of a second behind the rest, that is not so bad. Imagine if they made the sprinters run in secret, and then just announced the winner without us knowing how near or far the others were. That would never be accepted!
So if our favourite contestant is thrown off a show, and we do not know the actual results, that is also not acceptable. BUT if we knew our favourite had missed by just a few votes, we would be far less unhappy. It could look like this:
- the 3rd to last = 5,350 votes
- second to last = 5, 290 votes
- our favourite = 5,280 votes
In that case we could think our favourite did a great job and just needed a fraction more support.
By the way, phone voting is another problem, which I’ll cover in another post soon.
