He he... In their defense, launching a database that has hundreds of thousands of voters in very few hours, we were expecting some issues. This is a minor one and we expect they will have it fixed on Monday.

So who are taking over after the Freddies? Well, we are all Flyertalkers and have known Randy and the community for years. The group is well known through blogging, moderation on Flyertalk and in the press. The members are:

Management and Fundraising Committee
tommy777
oliver2002
xyzzy

Award Nominations Committee

gleff
sbm12
thezipper
Canarsie
rcs85551
MileageAddict

We knew that many for profit marketing companies were ready to pick up where the Freddies left of and we wanted the spirit of Randy's and Karen's remarkable work live on in a for non profit organization run by frequent flyers for frequent flyers.

As for the voting process and the nomination, it has changed dramatically compared to the Freddies. The Nomination Committee lead by Gleff, has spent hundreds of hours to put together the structure we have now. We knew that 80% of the voters the first year would be located in North America. That Delta Airlines won awards in Europe the last year, we found very strange. Face it, very very few people are like us that has a stack of elite cards in their pocket from all over the world. Most Europeans are members of the European programs and we wanted them to have a chance to win within their region and not have hundreds of thousands of Americans decide that their North American favorites should win among the European. Gleff will be able to elaborate. Trust me, it has been a VERY long, heated debate.

Anyways, I hope that clears things up a bit.

Thanks