On Wednesday, at 9:00 a.m. Kaliningrad time, the first round of the "Popular Vote" for the candidates of the sixth season of the International Award "My Affectionate and necessary animal" ended.
The results of the expression of the will of Internet users turned out to be somewhat unexpected for our team. We will tell you about what surprised us so much below.
In two and a half weeks, our wonderful candidates received a total of 93,373 votes.
At the same time, it is not the first time that we note that throughout the entire first round, absolutely all participants of the people's choice showed the utmost correctness and respect for all applicants without exception.
And now to the results. 34,111 votes of support were recorded in the "Our Brothers" nomination. But for the first time in the history of online elections, the candidates who took fifth and sixth places received the same number of votes of support. And by definition, the top five of the nomination automatically expanded to six finalists.
But, as advertising agents like to say, "And that's not all!" The seventh-place candidate was only one point behind the fifth or sixth place! You must agree, given the 1,212 votes of support he earned, one vote cannot even be considered an error. It could easily get lost.
Therefore, after much debate and discussion, we finally decided to admit the seventh-place nominee to the second round.
As we have warned before, we will not put in place and announce the number of votes of support following the results of the first round. We can only say that from the very first day, a quartet of leaders appeared in the "Our Brothers" nomination. But the other candidates who made it to the finals have every chance to compete for victory.
The list of nominees is published in the order of application numbers, not in the order of leadership. The five (in our case, seven) finalists in the "Our Brothers" nomination are as follows: Pobeda the mongrel from Samara, Bagheera the cat, Rona the canister dog from Kaliningrad, Irbis the Kamchatka Shepherd, Zair the service dog from Ussuriysk, Zakharya the hippopotamus from the Kazan Zoo and Tolik the service cat from Moscow.
The candidates in the "Responsible for those" nomination received 59,262 votes in two and a half weeks. One of the contenders took and firmly held the leadership position from the first week, but the rotation in the top five favorites sometimes took place several times a day. At the same time, all participants in the second round retain a real chance of winning the vote.
We would really like to expand the final pool here, however, the candidate who took the sixth place was 131 votes behind the nearest leader. And such a number cannot be written off as a margin of error.
The five finalists in the "Responsible for those..." nomination are as follows: the Kovcheg Foundation from Stavropol, schoolgirl Varvara Guznayeva from the Lipetsk region, a team of residents of Kamchatka, volunteers, rescuers from the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the State Inspectorate for Small Vessels, as well as Roman Mirzhanov from St. Petersburg and the Zoobishkek rehabilitation center from Kyrgyzstan.
We would like to thank all the voting participants once again for their utmost correctness. And we have no doubt that the spirit of mutual respect will be preserved by all our associates in the future.
Special thanks to all the nominees of the sixth season. We ask no one to be upset if you did not see yourself in the list of finalists of the "Popular Vote". First of all, we, and not only us, are sincerely proud of your worthy actions, which undoubtedly make this complex world kinder.
And secondly, the jury of the Award has not yet had its say. Based on the experience of previous years, arbitrators often mark those who did not enter the final pool of online voting.
So, the first round of the "Popular Vote" is over. On Thursday, February 6, the second stage starts on the Award's website. This season, seven finalists will compete for the title of People's Hero" in the "Our Brothers" nomination, and five candidates in the "Responsible for those..." nomination. Voting will end on February 26.
We wish you all good luck!