2022 MAMA Awards Under Fire After Alleged Evidence Of Voting Being Rigged

Mnet has since addressed the allegations in a statement explaining they will be monitoring votes and taking any “fraud” into account.

As the end of the year comes and December is a few months away, it means one major event for K-Pop fans: the annual MAMA Awards. Yet, fans have recently raised concerns that there might be vote rigging occurring after seeing inconsistencies in the voting data.

Although all the awards have a mixture of criteria, the 2022 MAMA Worldwide Fans’ Choice is one award solely voted by fans.

Many different groups and idols are nominated for this category, and the acts will be narrowed to the top ten through these votes for the final stage.

Yet, a recent Korean forum has put together a compilation of different graphs showing the voting for the groups. It is these images that have raised concerns.

When looking at the graphs for groups like BLACKPINK, aespa, BTS, and Stray Kids, the pattern seems to be quite consistent with clear moments of momentum. The largest peak on all these graphs also seems to be consistent, with them all coming around October 28.

Even with groups like NCT 127, TXT, and ATEEZ, which saw a few huge peaks, the rest of the results are seen as consistent.

Yet, some charts from groups have raised eyebrows after the patterns don’t seem to fit with the other groups, making netizens suspect some sort of rigging might be occurring. In particular, from the graphs, groups like IVE, DREAMCATCHER, LOONA, Kep1er, and Brave Girls have seen a huge increase in voting in the past few days.

In particular, while they seemed to average around 5,000 votes in the first days, they immediately shot up, with the groups gaining peaks of over 10,000.

While many believe the distinct differences in voting could be due to bots, others have pointed out that some of the groups with irregular patterns are much smaller with a more concentrated fan base.

With this in mind, some believe that the huge leaps in votes come from mass voting periods promoted by social media accounts. Others pointed out that due to the initial voting leading to a shortlist being decided, fans from fandoms vote hugely in short periods to ensure their idols get into the top ranking.

Yet, even on November 3, when looking at the percentages for each group, the huge spike has seemingly pushed all of the groups into the top 20 for the votes.

More recently, a Twitter account covering the stats for the awards shared the recent results. It seems like the groups mentioned as having seen the biggest increase in their voting percentages were the groups with “irregular” voting patterns.