Due respect, Randy, One of the things I've learned from reading your posts on Flyertalk over the years is that it's useful to have all the facts before making judgments.

So hopefully you'll bear with me, since I'm the Chair of the committee that put together the structure, voting processes, and nominations for the Frequent Traveler Awards.

I had always been a bit of an armchair quarterback about the Freddies, and this process taught me just how difficult it can be to put togehter a voting process. For instance, the Freddies wanted not just to be a popularity contest (who could spam their members enough to generate the most votes) but a recognition of the best of airline and hotel loyalty programs. And so the Freddies asked voters to select a program and rate it 1-10. The programs with the highest average rating by those offering to rate it was the program that would win (provided it was selected by a minimum threshold of voters). Problem is that different people rate the same thing differently, what might be a 10 to an excited voter like me might be an 8 (also good!) to someone else. Even if both voters think the program is providing tremendous value. And it turns out that voting an '8' for a program because you think it's the best in effect was a vote against that program, because it would bring down the program's average. That's why some programs began instructing their members to "Vote a 10 for...."

Still, it was an interesting innovation and more importantly a very important point -- that what we want isn't a popularity contest but an expression of the traveling public about which programs they beleive are delivering the most value to their members.

And while I used to shake my head too at some of the results, it's the public at large speaking, just as it will be with the Frequent Traveler Awards.

The voting is a little bit different though, instead of giving one program a rating of 1-10, we ask members to rank programs (up to 4). That way they're comparing programs, saying that they believe a program is best relative to others. We spent a good deal of time on the voting process, diving into political science literature. And while some of us were tempted by the more scientific but also obscure voting mechanisms that might do an even better job getting at the best representation of member opinion, there's also a need to be simple enough that folks can understand the process as well. In other words, there are tradeoffs in the voting mechanism as there were in the region decisions. And in a way I never truly appreciated as a spectator of the Freddies until I started working with committee members like sbm12, rcs85551, and thezipper to do this ourselves.

We've got fewer categories than the Freddies did, perhaps that's a mistake but in our first year we thought a more modest endeavor made sense. And it'll keep the awards ceremony a bit shorter, we'll get to the end of evening celebratios and the armchair quarterbacking that much quicker

And our regions are a bit different than the Freddies, the Middle East is grouped with Asia Pacific rather than Europe and Africa. That way the Emirates and Etihads compete against Singapores and Cathay rather than BA and Lufthansa.

Does that strike you as trying to rig the resutls? To us it just made more sense, we thought they were more like in kind. It's possible we were wrong and we're learning, but it seemed a reasonable judgment call to make. And that's what these things are -- judgment calls. Happy to take the heat for them, too.

Similarly, we decided that each airline would be assigned to its home region, and that every voter could choose which of three regions to vote in but they could only vote in one region. Now, that does mean that the excellent British Airways Visa from Chase won't be nominated as Best Credit Card in the Americas. And that members aren't comparing Continnetal against Air France-KLM. But the tradeoff seemed an unwieldly process. Did the Freddies have this right? Do we? Open to interpretation, but I believe we have a very reasonable approach towards getting at which programs members believe are doing the best job for them.

Now that I've taken you through all of that, hopefully you'll see that your concerns were misplaced.

Now, it's possible that Tommy mispoke above. He's doing yoeman's work in putting the event together, but he's not been a part of the nominations and voting decisions.

The only place where we've said we want certain programs to have a chance to win -- that's the programs whose members believe they're the best. Like the Freddies, we don't want a straight popularity contest and so we're designed to be more than that.

As anyone here knows, I'm pretty outspoken about the best and worst of frequent flyer programs. And as much as I like Hyatt this year, or Onepass and Aeroplan (I voted in the Americas), I'm only one vote out of what's already hundreds of thousands. No black helicopters here, we won't know who the winners will be until November 4 in Houston!

Got any more questions or concerns, Randy, you know where to reach me.

I still cannot vote. I go to the site using IE9. I select the airline plan and try to drag it to the box. As soon as my cursor leaves the airline box, the option I chose disappears. Will this ever get fixed or is IE9 the problem?

I suspect it is IE 9. The site statistics show the average amount of time on the site for IE9 is very short, about the same as for IE5.5, a browser that is completely obsolete and known not to work with a great many sites. We have had more IE9 visits than IE5.5, thugh! I have heard of IE9 compatibility issues with other sites. I suggest you try a different browser, but please -- do vote!

Xyzzy