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Poll Weirdness

I can't prove anything, but I'm calling shenanigans at the polls.

Sometime overnight (night of July 20-21) a flood of new votes came in, mostly concentrated on "BoM Poll 1: Who Moves Where?" and "BoM Poll 2a: Sydney Dates Kirkham as ..." , though the other two polls also saw an uptick. What is suspicious is that in the first two polls all the new votes were concentrated on one choice: for "Sydney Dates Kirkham as ..." in the first poll, and for "Lisa Yarborough" in the second (which is the follow-up poll to the choice "Sydney Dates Kirkham as ..." This looks an awful lot like ballot-box stuffing.

But I can't prove anything, so I can't and won't throw out the results. Instead, this is what I'm going to do:

Whichever choices win the polls, those are the chapters that I will (eventually) write. But in my spreadsheet I have started keeping a second set of figures which subtract the suspicious votes, so as to keep a separate, parallel running tally of what the vote would be if those suspicious votes had not come in. And whichever choices win this parallel, adjusted poll, I will also (eventually) write those chapters too.

To calculate the adjusted vote totals in "BoM Poll 1: Who Moves Where?" , subtract 12 from "Sydney Dates Kirkham as ..." To calculate the adjusted vote totals in "BoM Poll 2a: Sydney Dates Kirkham as ..." , subtract 7 votes from "Lisa Yarborough." In "BoM Poll 2b: Sydney Dates Will as ..." , subtract 2 votes from "Jenny Ashton" and 3 votes from "Andrea varnsworth." No adjustments are being made to "BoM Poll 2c: Will Dates Sydney as ..." . All GPs, both those already voted and those that come in, will be applied to both the official count and to the adjusted count.

Look, the goal of these polls is not to have a popularity contest. It is to give readers a voice on where the story goes next, and to write new chapters for you guys. As I say, I can't prove that there is anything hinky going on with the official poll results, and so it wouldn't be fair for me to throw them out -- I will definitely write chapters for the official winning choices. But to prevent people from feeling they got cheated, I will also write chapters for the choices that I calculate would have won if this cockeyed flood of votes hadn't happened.

And I hope this will make all the voters (even for the losers in both scenarios) happy because it will mean more chapters over all!