Voting System

The Voting Principle

The jovoto voting system is based on the “wisdom of the crowd”: the votes of many determine the best ideas.

The rating scale from 1 to 10 stars allows for a precise evaluation. A rating of 6-10 stars is a positive rating, while 1-5 stars is rather negative. The exact meaning of each rating is explained in the rating box, e.g. 6 stars “Nice approach! There’s some potential here.” or 3 stars “Poor idea! There’s still a lot to do here.”

You are free to change your ratings at any time up until the closing of the contest, e.g. after a radical revision of an idea.

The more community members who vote for ideas, the better. A multitude of votes makes the “wisdom of the crowd” work. This way, subjective preferences are evened out and it becomes apparent which idea is preferred by the majority of the users.

Therefore: rate, rate, rate!

The Voting System

Every idea enters the contest with a rating based on the mean value of the other ideas’ ratings. After that, the idea basically has to make its way alone and is ranked according to the ratings it receives. Ratings influence the rank of an idea in a positive or in a negative way. Suppose the current average rating of an idea is 4.62, then 6 stars will raise this value and 4 stars will lower it.

Sounds logical. But how are the cast votes processed? For this, jovoto uses a sophisticated algorithm, which prevents a distortion of the results. Example: with one positive and no negative ratings, an idea would have an approval rate of 100%; however, with 98 positive and two negative ratings, the approval rate would be only 98%. The algorithm makes sure these kinds of distortions don’t occur.

Supervision of voting

jovoto looks into every vote and checks if the way it was cast had been fair and above board. For instance, we try to make sure there are no micro communities, whose members give each other high ratings, regardless of the actual quality of the ideas. For the sake of fairness, we also don’t allow direct competitors to bash each other’s ideas just for the benefit of their own idea.
If jovoto’s surveillance system registers irregular voting behavior, the community members in question are asked to change their voting behavior. In addition, the community can use the ‘report misuse’ button to inform us about suspected misuse. If the suspicion proves true and the member in question doesn’t change his/her behavior, we send a notification and his/her votes are nullified, i.e. they don’t count in the final ratings. In severe cases of fraud, user accounts may be deleted completely.

For more information and answers check out FAQs and Voting System.