The countdown to the countdown, how your votes are recorded

Voting closes in Mushroom Fm's holiday countdown and Christmas party this Friday at midnight US Eastern time. If you haven't voted yet, it's an accessible process that won't take you too long. Visit http://MushroomFM.com/countdown2019

Our holiday countdown and Christmas party's a tradition we've run for some years now. Our aim is that for you, participation is easy, festive and fun. But there's a lot going on behind the scenes.

What happens when you cast your vote? Quite a lot as it happens. After you've cast your vote by either typing in the songs you want to vote for or selecting them from our simple combo box for each position, we ensure it's a legitimate vote and then enter it into the countdown system. We take this process seriously, so there are robust checks and balances. Your raw voting data is available for verification by multiple people, which means we can be assured of the integrity of the voting process.

Once we officially enter your data into the voting system, that's when you receive an email to invite you to the Christmas party. More about the Christmas party side of the show later in this little blog series. Haven't seen the email inviting you to the party after voting? Check your junk folder, especially if you're using Gmail. It's notorious for being overzealous about what it thinks is spam.

When you vote, the ranking of your songs matters. Internally, each of your top 10 is accorded a series of points. So when you vote a song number one, you push it higher up the chart than if you vote it number 10.

There are many ways one might calculate charts such as the one we build every Christmas, but we've settled on best practice as worked out by our mathematical and technical genius Gordon Luke. We don't call him Spreadsheet Luke for nothing you know!

We work hard to put this together every year, and the best bit is when we all get on the air and host the show you created for us.

So if you've not voted yet, be a part of the process yourself, and of course we'd be grateful if you could encourage others to enter into the spirit as well. Vote now at http://MushroomFM.com/countdown2019

Be with us as we count them down and have a festive party doing it on Sunday at 9 AM US Eastern time.

You can hear Mushroom Fm in all good radio apps on any platform, through personal assistants and smart speakers, and on the web.