Mikan loses to Konoka by 6 votes in round 2 of Saimoe 2007. She joins her crew in the heaven of lost moeliciousness, having an beerice cream.
According to this post on 2ch, foreign votes affected the outcome since Konoka got an extra 59 votes, sealing the deal.
And I bet most of those 59 votes are cast by people who speak English. Or not? At first glance, that data just concludes how foreign votes (IP not originating from Japan) pan out to, as I’ll cut and paste below:
0543 0400 0143 41.17% 37.59% 56.08% 26.34% è¿‘è¡›æœ¨ä¹ƒé¦™ï¼ ãƒã‚®ã¾ï¼ï¼Ÿ
0537 0453 0084 40.71% 42.58% 32.94% 15.64% 稲森光香（ã¿ã‹ã‚“ï¼‰ï¼ ãŒããˆã‚“ゆーã¨ã´ã‚ ã¾ãªã³ã‚¹ãƒˆãƒ¬ãƒ¼ãƒˆï¼
0239 0211 0028 18.12% 19.83% 10.98% 11.72% æ²™è‹±ï¼ ã²ã ã¾ã‚Šã‚¹ã‚±ãƒƒãƒ
In other words, out of the total 543 votes, 143 of Konoka’s votes originates outside of Japan. That could simply means people in Japan are voting from non-Japanese IPs, so it is inconclusive merely through that as to which demographic contributed to :3-chan’s loss.
A look at the by-the-hour chart of vote allocation, we get a better picture–Mikan held a comfortable lead at first, but it slowly went away until the end of polls, where she was upset. If we take the presumption of average internet usage–that Saimoe and its kin of tomfoolery take place during the night (8pm-2am) rather than during the day, we can see that Japan (and maybe Korea and Singapore and China and other locations with people interested in Saimoe) is still chiefly to blame for the downfall. It’s curious, as well, because Mikan had a demanding lead right off the bat, and it’s unlikely the same demographic had two different sways so drastically different.
Perhaps that means there are two divisive faction on 2ch when it comes to Saimoe–the people who keeps up with anime and people who do not? The latter is likely who votes early in the day (but near the end of the contest) and the former can stay up and watch those late-night shows, and vote on Saimoe as it begins the next day. But we don’t have to go that far…
The western fanbase failed–the shrinking lead during the eek hours would suggest as much. In the 12-hour gap between 5am Japan time and 5pm Japan time we see Mikan’s lead erode from 70 to 42, and that would’ve been peak hours for Europeans, all the Americans, and more.
It still smells suspicious, however. Ah well. It just means today the sun shines a little dimmer compared to tomorrow.
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