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danieldwilliamI’m going to take a look at the checks and balances within the Strictly Come Dancing Electoral College. The purpose of the College is to select the couple who will leave the competition. I think there is a slight systemic bias in favour of weaker couple. This is probably reduced in practise by a correlation between the popular vote and the quality of the performance.
There are four elements to the Strictly Come Dancing Electoral College. The judges’ scoring, the public vote, the combination of the these two elements and the dance off.
The judges’ scoring is very straightforward. Four judges award marks from 1-10 based on whatever criteria they like. The scores are amalgamated to give each couple a score from 4-40. There is no special role for any particular judge. A point is worth a point regardless of how it is given or by whom. Four 9’s are worth the same as two 8’s and two 10’s.
The judges’ scores inform a leader board, top scoring couple at the top, lowest scoring couple at the bottom. Points are awarded based on this ranking. The highest scoring couple scores points equal to the number of couples remaining in the competition. So if there were 8 couples left the top couple would score 8 points. The second place couple would score 7 and the lowest place couple would score 1. Couples who are tied, tie up, i.e. the two couples are awarded jointly the best place. Two couples on the same score, 1 point behind the leader get joint second, rather than joint third. Everyone else moves up a place. This tends to favour weaker dancers. There is a good chance that two or more couple will end up on the same score. This pulls the bottom placed couple up and they end up with more than 1 point. We’ll see how this works to their advantage when we turn to the public vote.
Four judges scoring independently provide a bit of balance to each other. The judges’ scoring also give the public votes something to mill on.
The second stage of the Electoral College is the public vote. Couples are ranked in order of their public vote on the night. This ranking is converted into points in the same way as the ranking from the judges’ scores are converted into points. Given the very small possibility that couples will be tied on votes the rules on tie-ing up don’t favour unpopular couples in the way they favour poorer dancers.
This gives us two leader boards both converted into points. To create the final leader board the points are added together to create a Combined Leader Board. This balances up the professional opinions of the judges with the popular view of the public at large. (Sort of, I’d prefer that we used preferential voting for each round of the public vote.) In practise it is difficult for someone who finishes top to end up in the dance off. It’s actually fairly easy for the bottom placed couple to avoid the dance off.
The bottom two couples enter the dance off. There are no tied places here. In the event of a tie the couple with the largest public vote ranks higher. This is where the rules on tie-ing up favour weaker dancers too.
Firstly, a couple who finish bottom of the judges scoring but top the popular vote will finish ahead of a couple who top the judges scoring but finish last in the public vote. In a week with 8 couples the top ranking dancer would score 8 from the judges and 1 from the public vote. The bottom ranked dancers will pick up 1 point from the judges leader board and 8 points from the public vote. Both couple score 9 in total. The weaker, more popular dancers ranks ahead based on the public vote. In situations where the top ranked for dancing couples are close on Combined Points with the weak dancers the stronger dancers must necessarily have performed worse in the public vote.
The second way the College favours weaker dancers is that they are more likely to be advantaged by the way tied couples tie-up. In a week with 8 couple and two ties, say for 2nd and 4th spots, then the bottom ranked dancer takes 3 points into the Combined Leader Board from the dancing. There is no way the top ranked dancer can score more than the maximum points, but the bottom ranked dancer could score more than the minimum points. Imagine a tie between the top two couples and the bottom two couples in an 8 couple week.. In this case if the best two dancing couples finished bottom and second bottom of the popular vote and the bottom two topped the voting they would end up with a combined scores as follows. Top Dancers, Lowest Votes, 8 +1 = 9, Top Dancer Second Lowest Vote, 8 + 2 = 10. Lowest Dancers, Top Vote, 3 + 8 = 11 points, Lowest Dancer, Second Top Vote, 3 + 7 = 10 votes. Both of the top dancers go into the dance off.
If I were reforming the Strictly Electoral College I would change the way the judges’ leader board deals with ties by creating a tie-breaker. I’d probably start with highest numbers of 10’s, then 9’s in this week’s scoring then cumulatively. So a couple with two 8’s and Two 10’s beats a couple with four 9’s. Starting with the cumulative number of 10’s might also work as it favours couples with consistently good scoring.
The two bottom ranked couples go in to the last stage of the College which is the dance off. They perform again. The judges vote on who to save. There are in effect five votes. Len as head judge has two. This will tend to favour stronger dancers. The judges have the final filter and will, by definition save the best couple of the two in the dance off. Whether they save the best couple on the night or the best couple over all is a matter for their conscience. However, they can only save the best of the two couples offered up to them. As we’ve seen with John Sergeant and Anne Widdicombe popular but poor dancers can avoid the dance off all together for weeks.
The judges can signal their disdain by awarding four 1’s to a dancer but his still puts them in bottom place and gives them 1 or more Electoral College votes in the Combined Leader Board.
I think the rules of the Electoral College slightly favour weaker dancers particularly where they have strong public backing not connected to the quality of their dancing. This does make the competition more of a popularity contest than perhaps it first appears. In practise this is probably mediated by the general tendency of the public to vote for the better dancers and the fact that over the long term the competition is really a run off voting system. A weak but popular dancer will eventually succumb to the Electoral College as their progress through the rounds begins to threaten better dancers and the vote for better dancers stiffens.
But then John Sergeant did happen.
