We’ve received this letter from SA Guild of Motoring Journalists chairman Danie van Jaarsveld, explaining how it came about that there was a tie for the 2011 SA Car of the Year award and why they couldn’t separate the top-scorers. Since we thought you might be just as confused as were, we bring you the text just as we got it:
“The 2011 SAGMJ Car of the Year competition produced two winners, the Volkswagen Polo and the BMW 530d. When the announcement was made, one could hear a pin drop and the uncomfortable silence lasted unbearably long.
It was not a universally or immediately popular outcome and a great deal has been said on the controversy, some of it being very critical. In view of the importance of CotY to the Guild and its sponsors, I take full responsibility for this decision and would like to share with you the thinking that led to this outcome.
A great deal has been made of how we, the Guild, would embrace accountability and transparency not only in all our processes, but also very specifically in CotY which has seen its credibility coming under increasing scrutiny.
To this end, and after a great deal of thought, we designed a process that, to the best of our knowledge, would yield a respected winner, give every new model a realistic and deserving chance of performing in the competition and to obtain the buy-in of the public at large - something which had been sorely lacking.
While I won't regurgitate the entire process now, suffice it to say that, in the end, 23 jury members applied 575 votes over the 10 finalists. My mathematical skills do not extend to calculating the probability of a tie, but intuitively it would appear to be remote. As things turned out, two vehicles produced the only tie in the scores at the top of the leader board.
Once faced with this situation, we had several options:
I could ask a confidant in the jury to alter one of his or her scores by a single point. Doing so would make a farce of all the openness, accountability and trustworthiness that we aspire to achieve.
We could attempt to determine a winner through an acceptable second interpretation of the scores, much like the driver with the most wins would win the Formula One world Championship if there was a tie at the top of the log.
On a count-out the Polo and the BMW, both had one 10 pointer, the Polo had a 9 and and an 8 pointer, while the BMW had two 8 pointers. If this was the basis for determining the winner, the Polo would have won.
Another legitimate reinterpretation of the results would have been to see which car attracted votes from the highest number of jurors. The BMW got votes from 16 jurors while the Polo had the support of 15 jurors. It was therefore clear that we could not reinterpret the scores without facing a legitimate challenge from the losing party.
The rules of the competition make no provision for the resolving a tie and any re-vote or other additional measure would simply have fallen outside the rules of the competition and was, therefore, not an option. The fact that a full voting grid with the exact scores of each juror, allocated to each model would be available for public scrutiny meant that whatever we did had to pass the test of fair play and scrupulous adherence to the rules.
The rules of the competition do however, contain two clauses that now, under these circumstances, were contradictory. There is a rule that says, “there shall only be one winner” and another that says “the winner is the car with the highest score” and we now found ourselves in the untenable situation where we were in breach of at least one of the rules of the competition, regardless of what we decided to do.
The only course of action open to us that did not require a deliberate breach of the rules of the competition through a specific action, was to accept that there were two vehicles that met the “the winner is the car with the highest score” criteria and that is what we decided to do.
It was not a cop-out. It was an unpopular, brave and a difficult decision, one that we knew would complicate the crowning achievement of our efforts over the past eighteen months and give our critics and detractors ample ammunition. Ultimately however, it was the only right thing to do.
What can we take from this event ?
The only fair criticism to which I do not have an adequate response is that we should have foreseen this eventuality and had a rule to solve the problem. It is an extremely unlikely outcome, but yes, we did not cater for it in our rules. We now need to agree upon and implement a procedure that will allow us to resolve such a tie if it should ever happen again.
The credibility of our new process has passed an unforeseen, unfortunate and difficult test to the credit of the competition and the Guild as a whole. Authoritative representatives of both the winning manufacturers volunteered to me last night that while they would have preferred to be the sole winner, their faith in the competition had been restored and that they were happy with and supportive of our decision making.
A number of other respected industry leaders further congratulated us on taking such a principled stand, putting the integrity of the competition ahead of expedience.
It says a lot for the new format that the BMW and the Polo could both be winners, underpinning the fairness of the contest and clearly demonstrating that there are no artificial or undocumented impediments to the performance of any finalist.
I apologise to each and every Guild member for the controversy and discomfort that this decision may have caused, but remain steadfast in my belief that the fact that we can be trusted to be accountable for our actions and to face the outcomes of our processes without manipulation, is in the long run, in the best interests of the Guild and all of its members.”