Don't think Brian will mind if I copy his comments on the voting for yourself topic here so more people will see it and we can get on with voting for the BEST 5. Edited to include only the voting issue and not the entire post.

******* copied from the lyric2 discussion ****

4. Voting for yourself. Believe it or not, I have gotten several folks who have emailed me and asked if they could vote ONLY for themselves. ACK! I don't care who you vote for. Obviously there are 10-20 people who will be voting who probably SHOULD vote for themselves as ONE of the best lyrics. But if everyone did, it WOULD be like voting for 4 instead of 5. I will simply say again, vote for the 5 lyrics that MOVE YOU THE MOST. If that is truly your own lyric, then by all means vote for it. Everyone knows in their own head and heart what they should vote for. If you follow that.. it will be fair.

... this is a MEMBER Music award.. it's only as good and meaningful as WE make it. If we have to play games like give everyone a vote (which wouldn't actually have an effect on the final winner anyway) or make a rule that no one can vote for themselves, then we aren't giving much credit to our members. I have confidence that the vast majority of our members will make the right and fair decision on who to vote for based on their honest opinions.

If we have a few strays who think they can get a boost by manipulating their vote in some way, does anyone really think that same person is going to get a critical mass number of votes from everyone else? It won't likely happen.

In fact, I expect there will be a collection of lyrics that will clearly rise and separate from the pack leaving little to no question of which lyrics are considered in the top tier for the Awards. We see this in the regular music awards. A small collection of songs will separate from the pack. They always do.

The fact that this is a peer award given by a collective of 19,000+ peers would mean a lot to me.

5. If someone doesn't vote for 5 songs.. their vote values will be decreased accordingly. For example.. if you only voted for 1 song.. that song would only get 1 point instead of 5... if you voted for only 3.. the first place vote would get 3 points... That way you can't give your own song (or any other) more than 1 point head start if that is your goal. That's one of our hopefully clever safeguards to voting abuse. If everyone just votes honestly, 1 point isn't going to matter.. so voting for yourself is okay (and as I said SOME people would be 100% justified in voting for their own lyric.)

Just vote honest.. the rest will take care of itself. If I entered and did something to try and manipulate the results and actually got nominated because of it.. how hollow and meaningless would that be? Very. And I would have to wonder from then on if perhaps my lyric was actually deserving of getting their honestly.. or if I just cheated my way to success. I think if most folks think it through, they'll do the right thing.

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[This message has been edited by Marty Helly (edited 09-04-2002).]

Marty my home

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again!