The countdown to the countdown. How did I rank thee? Let me count the votes

Voting closes in Mushroom Fm's holiday countdown and Christmas party this Friday at 11:59 PM North American Eastern time. If you haven't voted yet, it's an accessible process that won't take you too long. Visit http://MushroomFM.com/countdown2021 and be sure that your friends and family do too.

This year, we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of this tradition that many people now look forward to. 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. 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.

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.