Boston Music Awards Voting Policy

Voting is open to the online public from November 19 to December 5, 2008 at midnight. Winners are determined by a combination of votes from the Academy and the public, with the public accounting for 1/3 of the decision.

The custom online voting system was developed by Emergent Music LLC/FlyFi for the Boston Music Awards. The system was designed with the dual goals of providing a good user experience and limiting any potential abuse. FlyFi will be actively looking for 'gaming' and any abuse that could affect the outcome of voting, and will adjust the results accordingly.

A 'Vote' button is located near the name of each nominee. When a user first attempts to vote, he or she will see an industry-standard CAPTCHA challenge to ensure that the user is a human and not an automated system. The challenge consists of the presentation of an image of a distorted word that the user must type back. Upon successfully passing the challenge, users will be allowed to cast one vote for as many different artists as they wish. This CAPTCHA challenge eliminates voting by robots and other automated attempts to skew the vote. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha for more details. Users will be allowed to vote again for the same artist only after they pass another CAPTCHA challenge, with the corresponding delay and extra work required.

The intent of the system is to encourage fans to support their favorite artists, but not to vote excessively. Emergent Music reserves the right, under it's responsibilities to NEMO, as producer of the Boston Music Awards, to report any voting irregularities and adjust the results accordingly.