If you didn’t know Hasbro has brought the fan poll back for 2021. This is where they put up a bunch of figures that they can potentially make and let the fans decide who wins. EU movement efforts led to the victories of Darth Revan and Jaina Solo in 2015 and 2016, however after multiple fan sites threw out votes for Ben Skywalker in 2017, and Hasbro limiting the scope of the polls in the years since, EU fans haven’t had a candidate to rally behind in some years. However, this year they brought it back for the Vintage Line of 3.75” figures and will be redoing one of the following figures. With voting ending on the 23rd of April.
With this exciting news EU fans rushed to vote for the two EU candidates. But as the votes would be both on Facebook and Instagram, and they would require you to use certain hashtags to vote for your favorite, with restrictions of one vote per account per day, it makes tracking the vote from an outsider very hard.
I wanted to see how the votes were going, so on day 2 I found a work around to be able to count the votes by searching the hashtags, and compiled the votes together. This method isn’t 100% accurate as it cannot account for duplicate votes within 24 hours but I believe is as close we can get to an accurate count. Though my method of getting votes from Instagram is limited to once per day so I am only able to get daily updates at around 11pm pst. But I thought I’d share with you guys my findings on the first 6 days of voting, and hopefully keep you updated on how the votes go on as the poll continues.
Day 2
As mentioned before I was only able to get started late into Day 2 so this data is a mix of the votes that came in the immediate posts as well as those voters that came back to vote for day 2. But despite this they are quite promising for our EU characters.
Votes as of 4/10/21
TSF held a poll on our own discord and Facebook to see who we would throw our support behind and it ended up being Starkiller by a fairly close margin. Republic Trooper however took first quite easily with Starkiller a close second and then Ahsoka and Weequay at barely half the vote percentage with the Imperial Assault Tank Driver not even being worth mentioning. Needless to say it was looking very good for EU fans early.
Day 3
Day 3 didn’t see much change though Weequay did sneak away with a 1.5% increase in vote share while everyone else went down. I did notice that the Weequay seemed to be getting support from a lot of the hardcore collector types. As well as some of the same fansites that back in 2017 conspired to get Ben Skywalker votes thrown out. Still, it didn’t seem like much at the time as the lead was so immense and a 1.5% daily vote share would be hard to keep up.
Day 4
Day 4 was the first day I started tracking how many new votes were coming in as it could tell me more than the percentages could, and I’m glad I did because otherwise I would not have noticed the leap Weequay had made in new votes. With a higher net vote gain than the second place Starkiller and another 1.5% increase in vote share, it looked like the Weequay would make a comeback. Republic Trooper would probably still win but Weequay could possibly knock off Starkiller at #2. At the very least I expected Weequay to take third place by the end of day 5.
Day 5
Days 4 and 5 had some of the highest voting totals since I started keeping track and once again Weequay took the only gain in vote share, however this time it failed to get more votes than Starkiller, and even failed to pass Ahsoka for third place. It only picked up 0.5% of the vote share this time though due to a very strong showing for Starkiller. I still expected Weequay would take the third spot by the end of Day 6 but I was more confident that it wouldn’t be able to outpace Starkiller for second place.
Day 6
Day 6 saw the first jump in vote share for the EU figures since I started keeping track. Weequay not only failed to pass Ahsoka for third but also failed to gain any vote share for the first time since I started keeping track. Voting was a bit down overall from the previous two days, but it seems that Ashoka voters noticed that they were being out voted and rallied to stay ahead. I still think that they will be passed by Weequay eventually, but they’ve proved me wrong twice now so who knows.
Thoughts and projections
I’ve put each day’s vote totals for each character into a graph to show where they are and placed a trendline to see where they are projected to go. One thing I didn’t mention in my day to day analysis is the projection line changes as they pretty much all moved up each day. However, on day 5 I noticed that the trend line for Weequay had dipped down just slightly. By day 6 It dropped again while the Republic Trooper and Imperial Tank driver saw no change, and Ahsoka and Starkiller had another increase to their trendline. What this tells me is that both the Tank Driver and Republic Trooper are getting steady vote totals, Ashoka and Starkiller are still gaining votes and the rally of Weequay votes is dropping.
Overall, I think best case scenario for us is a Republic Trooper, Starkiller one two finish, with the rest of the field not even close to either. We are kind of getting that now but Weequay and more recently Ahsoka voters seem to have rallied and are chipping away at the lead. I doubt either can win the poll outright at this point but Starkiller is still vulnerable in my opinion of falling to third place or not having as big of a lead when the vote is called on the 23rd.
If you haven’t voted yet, then you can do so at either of the following links below. Just remember it is once per day per account. If you have been voting for the Republic Trooper than I encourage you to continue doing so as your votes have kept it up this far. But if you haven’t been voting or don’t have a preference between Starkiller of Republic Trooper I would recommend going for Starkiller as even if he doesn’t win having the two EU figures as a strong first and second place would go a long way in ensuring we get more Legends figures in the future. And even with the good news we’ve had in day 6 it isn’t a guarantee that Starkiller will retain that stranglehold on second place. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep you all updated on the vote results day by day. So, check back here tomorrow for an update on the voting results for day 7.
You can vote at either of the following links but only once per day per account
Just comment
#StarWarsVoteFromTheVault #Starkiller to vote Starkiller or
#StarWarsVoteFromTheVault #RepublicTrooper to vote Republic Trooper
This article is part of a series of articles. Click here for the previous article in the series and here for the next article.
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