Specific Tastes or Cliques of Jurors?

In this paper we first analyze the actual voting results in the 2016 Henryk Wieniawski International Violin Competition in which the Borda count was adopted to determine the final ranking of contestants. We show that some jurors are suspected of having exploited a weakness in the method to manipulate the final results. We then consider modifications of the standard Borda count with a view to designing a method more resistant to manipulation. We show that discarding all the scores of the 20% of jurors who deviate most from the jury average gives a ranking that agrees with the opinion of the public and of many experts. Modifications of the Borda count were then experimentally tested against their resistance to manipulability. The results clearly show that excluding jurors has very good statistical properties to recover the objective order of the contestants. Most importantly, however, it dramatically reduces the level of manipulation demonstrated by subjects playing the role of jurors. Finally, we present the mathematical properties of the method proposed. We show that the method with 20% of the jurors excluded is a compromise between the Majority Criterion and the standard Borda count in that it offers more “consensus-based” rankings than the former while being less vulnerable to manipulation than the latter. The method proposed in this paper may be applied not only to musical competitions, but to many other voting systems in which the Borda count is usually adopted, e.g. elections in educational institutions and professional and technical societies, sports awards, and even some political elections