THE IDEAL VOTING SYSTEM FOR TALENT HUNTS

A question for everybody to ponder upon: Why do we never see the best singers winning the talent hunt competitions??? Well many knowledgeable people may simply say that the voting system is flawed, its not correct to let the audience decide the fate of the contestants, let the judges decide the winner and so on. Well there is nothing wrong in any of these opinions… But why does every competition go for same system since the Indian idol started the trend. The answer is pretty simple. This system brings in lots of money to the channels and producers. As every person is given the freedom to vote as much as he wants and with so many people voting, one can easily imagine the sums generated by this system. Also this system automatically provides for more viewer response and viewing eventually leading to higher TRP’s. Hence the system works wonders for the organizers.

When the organizers are asked about the credibility of the system, they have an argument that after all, the winner has the support of the whole nation, so what is the problem? But are they correct? Does the winner have such all round support? No not at all. The winner is invariably decided by the zonal votes and not by nation votes. This is where the whole system goes wrong and falls flat. Let us see what actually happens in this type of voting.

The competition starts with certain no of participants. The viewer listens to all of them, likes few, dislikes few but he almost certainly chooses his favorite. The favourite one is generally the one belonging to his city, area or state. This is because he can emotionally connect with that contestant and obviously wants him to represent his own city. Now, every episode, no matter how that contestant performs, the viewers vote would still go to to him. Many would find this observation harsh but this is the reality. Hence the contestant who can garner most support from his region stands a great chance to win the competition. The support may include contestant having influential contacts who will increase his vote counts or simply the enthusiasm among the people of certain regions.

Hence what started as a fight for the best singe in the country sadly becomes a fight among the zones. Naturally at the end of the competition, the zone and people of that zone win(in the form of their contestant) and singing loses. The best singer is left cursing his luck and the winner takes all the accolades.

Then what is an ideal or atleast a better system which would still connect well with the audience and at the same time produce the most deserving winner? If the winner has to be decided by the audience alone to keep them interested in the competition, then I have thought of a system which could give much better results. It goes like this: The viewers are asked to vote for the worst rather than the best contestant. Each viewer can only give one vote to the contestant he liked least during a certain episode. The contestant getting the maximum votes gets eliminated. Now as we have discussed that the favourite of any viewer is not likely to change everytime, but definitely the singer he likes least may and will change from episode to episode. This is because the viewer will not have any preconceived thoughts while choosing the worst unlike in current system. Therefore, the people belonging to a region would still have different choices as the least liked and their votes would differ. Also as there is only one vote per person, this eliminates the possibility of source voting wherein a group of people would keep voting for the worst or best resulting in false outcome. Finally this would all contribute to impartial voting and a deserving winner. Ofcourse this system would reduce the cash quotient for the organizers quite a lot but still they would earn enough to satisfy their needs. Atleast the primary objective of the show would be achieved: The best singer must win.

No system can be completely flawless but I believe that the this one is the closest we can get to a perfect voting system. What say everybody???