The fan vote is broken: Here is what it takes to make people trust it again

I am the founder of MyStarChain, which runs blockchain-based public voting for awards, pageants and competitions through the MyStarPick platform.

In August my team ran the public vote for the 70th Miss Korea pageant. When the count closed, nobody asked us to prove it. The organizer did not need to, the contestants did not need to, and the fans did not need to, because every single vote already sat on a public ledger where anyone could check it. That is a strange feeling in this industry, and it is the reason I am writing this.

Public vote for the 70th Miss Korea pageant, August 2026. 7,855 fans cast 47,859 votes, every one of them recorded on a public blockchain.

Across the competitions we have supported since our founding, about 180,000 fans have cast more than 2.8 million votes through our platform. We have not had a single tampering incident, and that is not because we are unusually careful. It is because the system is built so that the operator, including us, cannot touch the count.

Public vote for the 70th Miss Korea pageant, August 2026. 7,855 fans cast 47,859 votes, every one of them recorded on a public blockchain.

Why trust collapsed

Anyone who works in Korean entertainment remembers November 2019, when the producers of Mnet’s Produce 101 series, the country’s most popular idol audition franchise, were arrested for rigging the results. The court later found that rankings had been predetermined across all four seasons, and the lead producer was sentenced to two years in prison. Fans had paid for every text-message vote. The groups formed by those votes were eventually disbanded.

Korea was not an exception. It was an early warning. Across the world, public votes for awards, talent shows, music charts and brand campaigns now face the same three threats: bot and macro voting that inflates a favourite overnight, organisers who can quietly adjust a count nobody can audit, and sponsors who no longer believe the numbers they paid for. Major broadcasters and award bodies have responded by tightening vote limits, adding fraud detection and rewriting their rules, which tells you how serious the problem has become. Yet every one of those fixes still asks the audience to trust the organiser. That is the part that is broken.

A popularity award that fans believe was bought or botted is worth less than no award at all.

What a verifiable vote actually looks like

The fix is not more moderators or a better spreadsheet. The fix is removing the operator from the trust equation. When every vote is recorded as a token transfer on a public blockchain rather than in a database someone controls, fans can verify their own votes. An organiser can hand a journalist a link instead of a statement. If a result is challenged, the evidence is already public.

This is what we did for Miss Korea, and it is what we did in Malaysia for the PC.com Readers’ Choice Awards 2026, the country’s largest IT awards, where consumers chose the technology brands of the year. We ran the vote for the BusinessToday Industry Choice Awards 2026 on the same infrastructure. This autumn we brought it to the audience vote of an international film festival, where the public, not the jury, decided which films to honour. We are also running the public vote for Supermodel International 2026 in Thailand, where fans can pay in their own currency.

Further Reading:

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The part nobody expected: It is also better data

Here is what we learned only after running dozens of these votes. A verified vote is not just a fairer vote. It is the most honest signal a brand can get about who its future customers are.

A survey asks a panel what they might do. A fan vote records what an identified person actually did, at a moment they cared about, for a brand or a person they chose. That is why we are now running a proof of concept with a global brand in which the same verified participants who voted are issued a redemption code, and we track whether they walk into a store and use it. The organiser gets a trustworthy result. The brand gets a line from participation to purchase, on people who chose to be identified, rather than on an inferred lookalike audience.

When every authenticated vote becomes a node in a graph of real fan relationships, it becomes possible to see which audiences cluster together, who actually influences whom, and which cultural trends are forming before they show up in sales. None of it works unless the underlying vote is trustworthy, which is why we spent years on the boring part first.

What I would ask organisers to do

If you run an award, a festival, a talent competition or a brand campaign with a public vote, ask your vendor two questions. Can a fan independently verify that their vote was counted? And if a result is disputed, can you publish the evidence rather than a statement? If the answer to either is no, you are asking your audience to trust you, and 2019 taught this industry how that ends.

The fan vote does not need to be abandoned. It needs to be made verifiable, and then it becomes one of the most valuable assets an organiser has.

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