Re: Golden Ticket Awards 2016: Fury 325 On Top (Awards Page
The Golden Ticket Award calculation methodology has always been an interesting one.
Amusement Today (who administers the polling) uses a total point system, awarding X many points to 1st place on each voter's ballot, and a decreasing amount of points to each ride following. So that is to say, 1st place may receive 10 points, while 10th place may receive 1 point.
The issue with using a total point system is it requires voters to have ridden roller coasters. Therefore, while one roller coaster may be better than another, a total point system will systematically favor those roller coasters that have been most ridden by all voters. Amusement Today has tried to control for this to a degree by splitting voters into respective regions. However, the bias still remains due to simple sampling error.
Other polling examples that exist out there are popular straw polls, such as the CF Roller Coaster Tournament, that has voters select their favorite roller coaster, regardless of ridership. Roller coaster judging is based on popularity, which will induce bias, but gives a fun, rough estimation of roller coaster rankings. There is also pair-wise polling, such as the Mitch Hawker Poll, which compares each roller coaster's ranking to one another in each respective ballot. So the focus is switched from assigning point values to rankings to distances between rankings of respective roller coasters. This is the best approach that exists to date, as it allows for a better metric of judging roller coaster rankings by better controlling ridership/polling bias.
Mitch Hawker did a great writeup on this back in 2003 if you're interested to read more:
http://www.ushsho.com/pollcomparison.htm