Hello again. First off I want to start by saying that this is in no way an announcement of who won the poll as Hasbro isn't likely to announce that for some time. This is just my predictions based on the numbers I have.
So for those that don't know Hasbro was doing another poll where the fans decide who gets to be remade into a new figure for the Vintage 3.75" line. The 5 figures you can see above were the ones that were in consideration and to vote all you had to do was go to the Facebook or Instagram post and comment #StarWarsVoteFromTheVault followed by the corresponding hashtag for the character you were voting for. Limit one vote per account per day. This went on from the 9th of April until yesterday at 11:59 pm EST the 23rd of April. I have been keeping a close eye on this race and informing you on the day to day vote totals based on my count.
This will be the final article in this series where I tell you how my count stacks up, my methods for counting, and even throw in some alternative methods that could be used. Again this isn't guaranteed to be who the winner is as we all remember what happened to Ben Skywalker a few years ago. This is just a projection based on the numbers I have, and I will explain how I got to those numbers.
So the numbers themselves were fairly straight forward. I used third party viewers that were able to load up all the comments on Facebook and Instagram much faster. All of those were copied first to a notepad to fix formatting issues, then to google sheets for sorting. Each subsequent day I would sort by new and add all the votes from that day up until the last one I had recorded to the sheet. Using the ctrl F command I searched for each hashtag and wrote down how many hits I found for each source. Then added up all votes for all sources to get the numbers I have been reporting on.
The sources include the Instagram post, the main Facebook post, and comments on the 6 pictures that accompanied the Facebook post. For this method I did not also search for the #StarWarsVoteFromTheVault hashtag as in the beginning I could not search for both hashtags. I wanted to correct this error once I found a way to do it but felt I would keep the updates with the method I had been using, then try other methods that were more strict once the results were in. For all of these I refreshed every source right when the clock struck midnight and got to counting. I also didn't count votes that misspelled any of the hashtags, posted the hashtags without a space, or posted with a + sign in between as all of these would make searching for the hashtags on Hasbro's end more difficult.
Results
These are the votes following the method of only searching for the hashtag of the character's name, which was the method I had used to count votes. Voting totals were back down to the week average with the EU finishing strong with a First place finish for Republic Trooper and a Second place finish for Starkiller. Third place went to Weequay that vastly outperformed Ahsoka down the stretch, Fourth to Ahsoka and Fifth by a long way was the Imperial Tank Driver. With this method Trooper wins easily.
Here's the chart of how votes went by day
But as Hasbro asked for both hashtags I wanted to see if the result still holds up so I got all the comments together on one spreadsheet and searched for both hashtags and got this
Filtering this way lost 1100 votes but the results and percentages stayed the same. Though I thought again about the sources and thought that just in case, what if they didn't go through and count votes on each of the comments for the pictures. They only asked for comments on the posts and there were hundreds more comments for EU figures than the rest. So filtering out these votes we get the following
And same results. It seems that no matter how strict you count the votes the order and difference between them stays the same.
My conclusion is that if they count the votes fairly in any of the plausible ways I have Republic Trooper is the clear winner, with Starkiller the clear second place. All that remains to be seen is if Hasbro agrees.
This article is part of a series of articles. Click here for the previous article in the series and here for the next article.
To see more EU news, updates, and original content about the Expanded Universe, click here!