EuroBillTracker

I was surfing the net and looking for information... and suddenly I found this message in a forum in english. it was written by a Greek citicen. So...

It textually says:

Actually there might be a good reason behind the change in results in the last few days...
You see the design No2 comes from a greek artist. I dont know what happened in other countries or if the designer's nationality of each of the coins was known prior to the end of the contest but in the last 3-4 days I received at least 3 times from different persons a usual "spam","mass" (call it what you like) email with the link to the contest and the info that this coin comes from a greek person so all greeks should support him!
Of course people like me and you, part of the numismatic community, had already voted long time ago but imagine how many "outsiders" they could have managed to persuade!
So maybe the last minute change has a reason after all...

...

Oh no, this is very bad.

"Eurovision song contest" comes again.

So much for this coin being a common European issue.

Christian

The fix was in. This vote has to be annulled asap!

This is what almost always happens with internet polls. Also resembles what happened with the Estonian euro coin vote..

Dakkus wrote:This is what almost always happens with internet polls. Also resembles what happened with the Estonian euro coin vote..

If somebody (or a newspaper, TV network etc.) starts a campaign saying that this or that is the best design, I don't find anything wrong with that "per se". But stating that "this coin comes from a greek person so all greeks should support him" would have been a violation of the competition terms if any of the participating mints had done that. In a Greek web forum they even mentioned Mr Stamatopoulos' name ... a day or so before the end of the vote.

So what went wrong (or was odd) in Estonia? I know they had a phone vote, and I don't particularly like the winning design as the sole one, but that's about it ...

Christian

I give you the link in which you will be able to read the information:

http://www.fatsimare.net/profile/forum/ ... 63e09df373

Well... in the case you also know the Greek alphabet and the language...

I confirm that the story of the e-mail sent to Greeks is true. I received it from a colleague at work about two weeks ago and the wording was the one mentioned herein (more or less). Up to that moment I had no idea who was the designer of which coin and I had actually already voted for design no. 5.

Frankly, I would still vote for no. 5, something I stated in my reply to my colleague. I am actually very surprised to see that the result changed following the distribution of the aforementioned mass e-mail (apparently because of that e-mail). The European Union should get a lesson from this "distortion" of the average European public opinion (if such a notion can be perceived to exist) and rely less on internet voting in such matters. The parallelism with the European Song Contest is very accurate, in my opinion.

But we shouldn't go too far with this. If the ECB wanted to represent the will of the majority of Europeans, they would have promoted a national referendum in each of the 15 states of the Eurozone. And if they wanted to have just a rough guess about the opinion, they could have booked a poll from a poll agency. (lol, I guess "poll agency" isn't the correct name )
Evidently the ECB just wanted people to get involved in the matter, and this is exactly what happened (at least in Greece)

WinstonSmith wrote:If the ECB wanted to represent the will of the majority of Europeans, they would have promoted a national referendum in each of the 15 states of the Eurozone.

Oh, please. A referendum? And not only that - 15 separate ones? Sounds like an awful overhead for something that is not really worth it. Besides, if Slovakia joins Euroland before (or on the day) the coin issued, it would be odd to not let them "vote".

Nah, basically the web vote was OK. The main problem in my opinion was that the media coverage was pretty meager, and thus so very few people actually voted.

Christian

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't saying we should have had a referendum.

My point is:
- If this was a matter of fundamental importance, we would have held a referendum;
- Instead we held a simple online voting, which means that the ECB's primary goal was (obviously) to create interest around the euro, and *not* to actually choose the best design.

So there's no point in complaining that the vote was somewhat rigged.

If thousands of Greeks received dedicated emails and rushed to vote for "their" design, imho this is not a shame, but a success

WinstonSmith wrote:So there's no point in complaining that the vote was somewhat rigged.

Weeelll ... according to the European Commission (by the way, the ECB did not have anything to do with the vote) the names of the designers were not supposed to be revealed until after the contest. Obviously that worked for all except the Greek designer, and the campaign in Greece to vote for him. Ah well, who knows what the result would have been if several million Europeans had participated.

Christian

I think the best way to do such polls is to select 2000 people from all parts of the population and ask them in a survey, that for example is sent to these people by mail. This will cost a few 1000 euros, but the online poll surely cost some money too.

there have already been other surrealistic people on a coin:

from where is that coin? Hint: it's a coin with 12 corners

Ha, that one I know. Australia!

Here is another "children" piece, from Hungary:
http://worldcoingallery.com/countries/img14/85-780.jpg
(But that is actually the logo of that initiative.)

And then the "laatste gulden", of course - the last Dutch guilder coin:
http://www.schooltv.nl/mmbase/images/139102
(This one was designed by a schoolkid.)

Christian