BB Voting – a Guru Exposé

“It’s time to go, Demet!” Fortune has smiled on Emma: of the four nomination rounds to date she’s been saved in 1, 2 & 4 by the Twist, and Round 3 saw her up against Demet, the second least popular White Room inmate.

It’s annoying that the producers withhold how many of the total votes are Saves and how many are Evicts. However, armed with a paper napkin, Biro and steely determination it’s possible to get a rough idea*. In the TJ/Bodie eviction, about 45.5% of the total votes would have been Saves (mainly for Bodie and Joel). TJ, by The Guru’s reckoning, received less than 28% of all votes (Save and Evict), so the ‘merged’ bar chart showing her at 54% and the others all at 7% or less was extremely misleading.

Big Brother’s figures were TJ 54%, Bodie 7%, Zoran? 2%, Joel? -37%. These (as absolute numbers) add up to 100%, but it makes no sense for the merged votes to do this. With every Save vote cancelling out one Evict vote, the merged chart should have been TJ 17.5%, Bodie 2.5%, Zoran? 1%, Joel? -12%. Put simply, this is because each bit of green cancels out a bit of red the same size.**

In the Demet eviction there was a far smaller proportion of Save votes — only around 23% in total (Demet 5.5%, Emma? 13%, Zoran? 4.5%). Over three-quarters of the total vote was on the Evict side (Demet 40%, Emma? 30%, Zoran? 7%). The question marks, of course, are due to the producers not revealing which nominee is which.

The proportion of Saves to Evicts is information that should be out there. And if the producers did the graphs this way (a) the graphic of them merging would suddenly make sense to people and (b) The Guru could avoid some highly disapproving stares at restaurants...


* All figures here are approximated — the Solver plug-in in Excel goes into meltdown attempting these calculations! Any mathematical savants out there, forget about those pesky Fibonacci Sequences — this is your new challenge!

** if the graph shows Save and Evict votes in proportion, which the BB ones do not.

Big Brother presented the Save, Evict and ‘merged’ votes in the TJ/Bodie eviction as follows: TJ 11, 41, 54; Bodie 51, 47, 7; ? 9, 9, 2; ? 30, 3, -37. And in the Demet eviction: Demet 24, 52, 65; ? 57, 39, 31; ? 19, 9, 4.