The countdown to the Countdown. Making a list and checking it twice. How we rank and count your votes

Voting closes in Mushroom Fm's holiday countdown and Christmas party this Thursday 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 https://MushroomFM.com/countdown2023 and be sure that your friends and family do too.

We certainly don't see you when you're sleeping. Dude, that would be creepy! We may know when you're awake if you choose to tell us by tooting on mastodon or sending us an email. And collectively, you're making the list, we're checking it twice. Precisely how do we do that?

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!

In 2021, things got very exciting when the top two songs in the countdown ended up with the same number of points. That's unlikely to happen again, but if it does, we break the tie by looking at which song received the most number one votes. That's how the Pogues made it to the top of our chart that year.

We work hard to put the countdown 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 Saturday at 7 AM US Eastern time, noon in the UK. If you check the Mushroom FM schedule, it displays in your local time zone, so you know when it starts where you are.

You can hear Mushroom Fm in all good radio apps on any platform, through our Alexa skill, and on the web via our accessible player.