If there was some way of restricting the voting then I think they should do it, but it is very difficult to enforce.

What does winning mean if it is by virtue of people block voting 10s (or even 100s) of times? It makes it all meaningless.

Those Jay fans were free to vote as much as they like and I don't think they deserve to have their posts dragged out of their appreciation thread and placed in here to basically be mocked and sneered at.

That was me.

How could that be enforced though?

I agree. It's getting particularly ugly around here.

Sweet Jesus! I just can't!

To be honest, if people don't mind putting it out there in the first place then they can be brought anywhere onto the forum.
They were posted proudly, so own them. He won by people block voting clearly, not because he was the best on the night nor even the most popular with the most people, he just had the people who would go to such lengths. No great moral victory or anything.

Yes, but the point is that Kellie and Georgia had an equal opportunity to inspire devotion of this kind. There will have been people voting like this for them as well, but not as many. And that's why Jay won - he Inspired this level of bonkers voting. I recognise a lot of the names and they are new fans from strictly, not legacy boyband fans. You can 't try to put checks and balances round this kind of thing, it just doesn't work. Popularity is not logical or subject to rules, it just is. By highlighting the multi-voters, you're just highlighting the extent to which he moved people. There's not much more to be made out of it.

The single voters' votes do count in my opinion. There may be 100s of multivoting fans, but millions of single voters. Anita would have won if the super fans really dictated the outcome. I like to think my three online made a small difference.

We don't know clearly that he won by block voting because we don't know the voting figures. You can assume that if you want and you have facts that show that some people on here voted in great numbers for him. Neither you nor I or anybody else on here will ever know exactly how many people voted for him though. And who needs a moral victory when he had the actual victory.

Restricting the votes will not stop the luntatics multiple voting.

Yes, but exactly WHY was he reckoned to be the most popular celeb? That's the whole crux of my astonishment with this year's series!

He may have become popular through the weeks of the show, but most of us had never heard of him before then, so where does this huge 'popularity' come from? I'd genuinely love to know because it might unlock the secret of why so many people have said all along that he was the sure fire winner.

Ideally yes - but it would be difficult to ensure that happened.

It might then make it easier for a betting cartel to put a large bet on a high odds finalist and try to rig the result.

I'm going to be honest though, this sort of obsession/devotion comes from women projected onto men, you will never find the same thing projected onto other women. Even those who deny it's because of that, you never see the same fandom in women or girl groups as you do women for men.

They posted on a public forum,they're fair game.

I have been there.
After seeing Kimberley and Pasha in the bottom two and having read that somebody claimed witness to block voting by Harry Judd fans the previous year,I took to multiple phone votes for the rest of series 10.
It did no good.
Last year I just used the online three for Caroline,not bothering to investigate ways of getting more and She won. Yay Flackers

Should be, one person,one vote.

First, being a nice, unassuming person helps a lot. A lot of people are put off by "in your face" celebrities, or celebrities who's niceness come off as totally fake. (Looking at you,
Peter Andre.) Humility and self-effacing humor also helps.

Add to that the fact that he's a beautiful dancer, and boom. Success.

I can't speak for others but for me he seemed quiet, humble, didn't use personal sadness in his life (death of grandad) to garner sympathy, in fact it wasn't even mentioned. There were no tears, no falseness, no fake humility. For me he seemed like the nice lad-next-door type. I'm the wrong side of forty so no boyband fandom from me, I'd never even heard of him or the band. And then he blew me away with his dancing.

I also liked Georgia's fabulous dancing but all the focus on her illness, all the tears made me feel a bit cheesed off.

Kellie I found ungainly. Just a personal thing I suppose but there wasn't much grace in her dancing, except the AS, half of which she spent being lifted in the air. The capering, screeching and gurning put me off her, and as an EE fan I wanted to like her, I even picked her in the work sweepstake we do every year.

I loved Anita.

In the first few years of Strictly, the phone lines were open all week. James Martin (series 3?) did a cooking demonstration at Earls Court to hundreds of people. He then asked them all to get out their phones and multi vote for him there and then for the Saturday show. I'm not sure when they changed it to voting only being available during the Saturday but it wasn't before series 6.

So block voting, voting for favourites, voting for personality, has been a staple of this show since its beginning.

In Strictly terms, I think from years of lurking that the Jay multi-voters voted just as obsessively for Kara. And as I said, Anita also inspired this kind of voting pattern from female voters. I'm not sure it's true that girl groups don't have obsessive fans, many of which are female. It's more about identification rather than projection, though. The Jay voters are often also Aliona voters.

This is probably too heavy for a dance show, but as a Media teacher, I'm aware of a lot of theory that would suggest that women project onto men and women equally but in different ways. Put simply, women would want to be Georgia (in a Strictly dancing context) and would want to dance with Jay. As the demographic for Strictly is largely female, I think this would suggest the celebs are in with an equal chance of getting this kind of support. These theories would suggest male celebs would have a hard time with a bigger male audience as men will project onto women more comfortably than other men. Just the theory, not my opinion.

Early series, the votes were raising cash for Children in Need. So multiple votes encouraged and voting all week before the show - obviously personality votes rather than the actual dance. The amount raised and announced each week showed the way vote numbers rise over the series. No official announcement, but that's almost certainly the case still.

Phone votes are restricted by the cost. Possible to restrict votes other than the obvious way of using multiple phones. It's the nature of these events that votes are counted separately on each mobile network and forwarded to the count. It's why it takes a few minutes from vote close to announcement.

Didn't the first online voting allow 5 votes? Whatever. it's not easy to restrict votes to any number per person. Look at the trouble general elections have to go to with registration and ticking names off a list as they vote. Way off the cost and practicality scale for a TV show. Recording the online id against the vote is possible. The "clear cookies" tricks would appear to work but would be pointless at the final count if only the first 3 got through. Trying to record IP address wouldn't work because many devices in a household use the same one, and it's usually dynamic (change on demand) anyway.

Logging in with different IDs gets around any restriction, you just need to be organised and prepared to spend 40 minutes or whatever doing nothing else. It probably cancels out fans of other dancers mostly. Could be possible to restrict ID issue, but that's really only going to work if there's another limit, such as a fee where multiple ids using the same credit card can be detected. I'm thinking Labour party leader election style. With anybody able to create as many gmail (etc) accounts as they want for free relying on email accounts is really only a question of how much effort voters are prepared to put in to keep multiple ids going.

However, and this is pure speculation, the fans voting throughout the series are probably those applying for SCD tickets and going to the pro tour, pretty much the people who appear in the ITT audience on Fridays. Maybe earlier in the series, more likely in the final, those prepared to spend the time and effort multi voting are probably younger. That does favour the dancers appealing to that age group, i.e. popstars and presenters connected with pop not soap actors. And the forum discussions of Jay fans are particularly open about doing it this year.

Well most certainly the whole Nottingham region shouldn't have been allowed to vote for Jay in a bid to equal things out. Well, to guess your region you'll have to provide two copies of utility bills.
Clever, huh?!
I wonder how they haven't thought about it yet
Plus - only 4 votes per household. Max.

Therein lies one of today's biggest problems.

How many of those voting ( probably numerous times) for a celebrity (a dubious status in some instances) bothered to vote in the last general election?

Celebrity has become and is more important than the governance and the future of our country to many these days.

Sorry. I can't agree with that.
The Appreciation threads were founded by DS to allow supporters of people (whether musicians / celebrities / actors / athletes) a safe areas to share their 'appreciation' of them away from the main forum and any mocking or criticism, so to drag not only the comments but their usernames as well into the main forum for the sole purpose to mock and deride them is not right in my opinion.

Can this post be removed from thread - Surely the whole point you set up appreciation threads was to allow a place away from the main forum to allow supporters to air and share views without mocking, sneering and derision. To include usernames along with their comments I think is unfair particularly when it is pre-fixed with the BIB, insinuating that these posters are not normal people - shameful.

Nope, it's not a private forum, if it was then it wouldn't be on, but those there for anyone to see and use just like any part of the forum.
It's sillyness to feel that you are excluded from normal forum use just because it is an appreciation forum. It's no different.
I post in the tennis thread, anything I post there is not confidential and open for all to see and use, why would it even matter?

Get a grip, is this the actions of a normal person.