There’s just two days left to vote in Hasbro’s Empire Strikes Back 40th Anniversary Fan’s Choice Poll. The winning character from this poll will be released next year as a Black Series 6-inch scale figure.
As there seems to be some momentum behind Willrow Hood I thought it would be interesting to look at the votes so far.
First of all, I pity the Hasbro or PR person who has to tally these results as getting information from Instagram comments is not easy or fast. As such, I wrote an application to go through the data and pull the votes.
Here was my criteria:
- Only comments that started with a number (i.e. ‘5’) or a number sign followed by a number (i.e. ‘#9’) were counted.
- Any comments that ended in a number were removed.
- Any typed names (i.e. ‘Lobot’) were removed
- Any typed comments were removed
- Anyone who selected multiple characters in a single comment, their first choice is all that would be counted (assuming it was the start of their comment)
Note that is the criteria I used when writing the program. Hasbro may use different criteria.
With that run, I calculated (as of 5:30pm Central on March 6) there were:
- 3,499 comments
- Of those, 2,611 became valid votes under the criteria above.
So who’s winning? Here’s the breakdown:
- Wedge Antilles in his Hoth Snowspeeder gear is in the lead with 407 votes.
- Luke Skywalker in Dagobah is in 2nd with 378 votes.
- Lobot is close in 3rd with 352 votes.
- 2-1B is hot on his heels with 341 votes
- Willrow Hood is in fifth with 310 votes.
- My choice, Probot, is in 6th with 285 votes.
Full numbers:
| Wedge Antilles | 407 |
| Luke Skywalker | 378 |
| Lobot | 352 |
| 2-1B Droid | 341 |
| Willrow Hood | 310 |
| Imperial Probe Droid | 285 |
| Hoth Rebel Soldier | 201 |
| Princess Leia | 200 |
| FX-7 Medical Droid | 78 |
| Ugnaught | 59 |
The other question I had is how much ballot-stuffing may be occurring, as Instagram has no mechanism to limit to “One person, one vote”. So I removed all duplicate instances where the same person voted for the same character more than once. So if John Doe voted for 2-1B and for Lobot both votes still count, but if he voted for 2-1B ten times it would count once.
There was not much ballot stuffing, the worst case was Instagram user @starwars77toys who voted for Willrow Hood 14 times.
With those removed, though, here were the results:
While there isn’t much difference, you’ll see Willrow Hood took quite a dip and fell from 5th to 6th place. Now we have:
| Wedge Antilles | 398 |
| Luke Skywalker | 369 |
| Lobot | 350 |
| 2-1B Droid | 331 |
| Imperial Probe Droid | 280 |
| Willrow Hood | 274 |
| Hoth Rebel Soldier | 198 |
| Princess Leia | 191 |
| FX-7 Medical Droid | 78 |
| Ugnaught | 57 |
There are still 2 days to vote at the Hasbro Pulse Instagram and it’s still anyone’s game (except FX-7 and Ugnaught, it seems).
Are you happy with these results? Let us know in the comments below!
