Note from Gene Epstein About the Voting Results
A Relatively Brief Statement From Gene Epstein About Oxford-Style Voting at the Soho Forum:
Oxford-style before-and-after voting requires that the audience vote Yes, No or Undecided on the debate resolution before the debate begins and then vote again after it ends. The side that picks up the most votes is declared the "winner" of the debate and is awarded a Soho Forum Tootsie Roll.
Our debating app is programmed to recognize only those in the live and livestream audience who use their smartphones to vote both times. One-time votes are automatically rejected, which unfortunately occurs not infrequently.
We of course want people to vote their sincere beliefs both times, and I believe that the vast majority do. But it's possible to "game" the voting system by voting for what you don't believe the first time and then voting for what you do believe the second time. To the extent that this might happen, it could misrepresent the real views of the audience.
Voters who "game" the system in this way tend to cancel each other out, since they usually operate on behalf of both sides of the debate. But partly because gaming can occur, I regard debates that are "won" by a margin of less than 5% as lying within a margin of error. Even though the "winner" is still awarded the Tootsie Roll, I view less-than-5% margins as really dead heats. (Less-than-5% margins have occurred in 14 of the 60 debates we've had so far.)
Our Dec, 8 debate was won by the negative side by a margin of 2.43 percentage points; hence really a dead heat.
There had been an unfortunate and ill-advised Substack missive by the Negative side proposing that the voting be gamed. But especially since this Substack note was read by only a relative handful of subscribers, we have no real evidence that the note influenced the outcome. We don't know if any of that handful were even present to cast a vote, much less follow the proposal that their vote be gamed, and much less follow the proper way to vote. And even assuming they did influence the outcome, the vote might have swung to a 2.43 percentage points edge in favor of the affirmative side, which also would have been a dead heat.
But still, the voting results for the Dec, 8 debate remain "open to question," and that's why we've labeled them as such on our website.
Finally, we mainly view Oxford-style voting as a way to add a little extra drama to the evening the debate is held. The real judges are the tens of thousands of folks who catch our debates on YouTube and The Soho Forum Debates Podcast. It's up to them to individually decide whether either side's arguments influenced their thinking in some important way.
Gene Epstein
Soho Forum Director