This happened in JOSS-contest and now it's happening again. WHY? There are two alternatives of arranging a better online voting.
1) One vote per person, just like in real election. Simple, but honest. You either vote or you don't. This one is definitely the best of all, although you can only vote for one candidate.
2) A voting system based on "highest score". People can vote for several candidates, give them either low or high scores (for example on a scale of 1-10) and then the candidate with the highest score wins. The bad thing in this system is that a high score turns out to be more valuable than a low score, because the scores are added together. For example 10 is twice much more valuable than 5. However, when adding scores together, there are no "unfair votes", because you can't lower anyone's score by giving them a low score. If somebody wants to be unfair (and I believe there are many) the worst he can do is to not give any score at all. Therefore the voting remains untouched, as nobody has to modify it by removing seemingly "unfair votes".
In the "rating system" the voting is based on the average of given votes, not on the amount of votes. In my opinion, rating is fine when it comes to rating regular videos and pictures on this site, because it's just easier to see whether a video/pic has a low or high 1-10 rating, instead of a long and complex number that doesn't really tell you anything. BUT this is a competition, all the film groups have put a lot of effort in it and the prize is not bad either.
On the rules®ulations page of this contest it says: "Anyone found to be blatantly giving a high rating to only one entry and low to others will have their votes removed." The problem is that nobody has defined what exactly is an "unfair vote" and what isn't (or is it if you rate less than 5 like MacMahoooon just wrote.) I understand that this kind of voting must be modified afterwards, because cheating will happen, but neither the voters or the competitors cannot be sure what kind of modifications NS makes before releasing the final results. Therefore, I think newschoolers should change voting system in this kind of competitions, or at least define very carefully, how the votes are modified.
