Star Wars

Hasbro’s 2019 Fan’s Choice Poll – Midpoint Results

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 Antilles407
Luke Skywalker378
Lobot352
2-1B Droid341
Willrow Hood310
Imperial Probe Droid285
Hoth Rebel Soldier201
Princess Leia200
FX-7 Medical Droid78
Ugnaught59

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 Antilles398
Luke Skywalker369
Lobot350
2-1B Droid331
Imperial Probe Droid280
Willrow Hood274
Hoth Rebel Soldier198
Princess Leia191
FX-7 Medical Droid78
Ugnaught57

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!

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