Voting and Scoring
How votes are spent, how points are counted, and how ties break
Your vote budget
Every voter gets the same number of upvotes and downvotes each round, set by the league. Three up and one down is the default.
The budget is per round, not per song. You choose how to spread it, and you can put several votes on the same song if the per track cap allows it.
Votes are spent on the net, not on the tap
What counts against your budget is where a song ends up, not how many times you tapped.
Downvote a song and then change your mind and upvote it back to zero, and you have spent nothing. The downvote is refunded rather than an upvote being charged. This means you can move votes around freely while you make up your mind, and only the final position costs you anything.
Per track caps
A league can limit how much of your budget lands on any one song. With five upvotes and a cap of two, no single song can take more than two of them from you.
Without a cap, you can put everything on one song.
Optional downvotes
By default a ballot is only finished when the whole budget is spent, downvotes included. Some leagues make downvotes optional, so you can finalize without using them.
Upvotes are never optional. A ballot with upvotes left over cannot be finalized.
Drafts
Your ballot saves as you go, and it saves to your account rather than to the device. Start voting on your phone and you can pick it up on another device where you left off.
A draft is not a vote. Nothing you have not finalized counts for anything.
Finalizing your ballot
The Submit button turns on when the budget is fully spent. Finalizing locks your ballot in and shows you the round as it stands.
Only finalized ballots score. This is the single most important thing to know about voting, and the reason is the next section.
How points are counted
A song's score for the round is its upvotes minus its downvotes. Your score for the round is the total across all the songs you submitted.
Round scores add up over the season, and the leaderboard is the running total.
What happens if you do not vote
If you submitted a song but never finalized a ballot, the round treats you differently, and it is not symmetrical.
Every upvote your song earned is thrown away. Every downvote it earned is kept. Your score for the round becomes zero at best, and stays negative if it was negative.
So a song that would have scored plus six scores zero, and a song that would have scored minus two still scores minus two. On top of that, total downvotes is one of the tiebreaks, so those kept downvotes go on working against you at the end of the season.
In a league asking for several tracks, this is worked out one song at a time and then added up. A plus three and a minus one become zero and minus one, so the round total is minus one rather than zero.
How ties break
When two people finish level on points, the app works down a list until something separates them.
- 1. Total points
- Highest wins.
- 2. Total downvotes
- Fewest wins. This one runs the other way.
- 3. Best round
- The higher best round wins. This is a whole round total, not a single song, and it never goes below zero.
- 4. Correct guesses
- The better detective wins.
People who leave part way through
If somebody leaves during a round, their song stays in the round. The playlists were already built and published, and pulling a track out of them is not possible.
Their row is greyed out and cannot be voted on, and the song is left out when the round is scored. Their leaderboard row is removed.
A finished league is left alone. Standings at the end are final and are what goes into everyone's permanent record, so somebody leaving afterwards does not promote everyone below them.
Guesses are not affected. If you correctly guessed somebody who later left, you keep the point.
Results
Finalize your ballot while voting is still open and you get an early look: the songs ranked, with totals, but no names attached and no per person detail.
Once the round is over the full results open up. Every song is shown with who submitted it, who voted on it and how, the notes people wrote, and who guessed correctly. Tap a row to expand it.
Some leagues hide results until the round is over. That applies to everybody, including commissioners.
Comments on your votes
You can attach a note of up to 500 characters to a vote. These show up on the results screen once the round is over, next to the song and attributed to you.