This is my write-up for the 9th Cinderella Girl General Election. I can't say I'm an expert at elections for this game or mobamasu in general so treat this as a giant opinion piece.

I will not be going over the whole election results I will only be talking about points of interest in the interest of keeping this under 40000 characters. Besides nobody is paying me to write this thesis.

1. Premise
Let us begin by talking about the most basic thing about the election, the timing and the setup. The rules this year are different from that of previous years. In this year's election there is also a voiced idol audition (they refuse to call this an election out of semantics) which was last featured in the year that arisu got voiced and resulted in that whole saga where Syuko sniped Cinderella girl next year after airsu had gotten first place. So as a quick reminder here is how this year's election worked

Top 5 get a song

Top 3 voice audition get a voice and a song

No more top 3 type songs

No midway point/prelim results

This has several knock on effects that we see and will discuss later. In fact these changes are the most interesting things to talk about. More so than the results. People who have heard me ramble all about this in discord will know some of the points I'm about to surface again.

2. The death of passion
This election spells the death of passion as a type, especially in terms of new voices. This is evident by the election results where the top 5 idols are 4 cool 1 cute and the top 3 unvoiced are Akari, Shinobu, Nanami. In the voice audition side, we get 2 cool and 1 cute. Passion idols have previously been known to "cheat" the system by getting into the CD by placing ridiculously low yet making it in due to being the top 3 of the type. Passion has been a weak type in general and discussing the reasons of their unpopularity in general would be an entire essay in itself and involve fields that I'm not totally well versed in (such as the treatment of passion idols in mobamasu) so I will not be touching this here. The long story short is that this effect is caused by two reasons.

The first is the removal of the top 3 song, which is the obvious one. Without a top 3 song there will not be a minimum representation of 3 passion on the election CDs and hence we will move towards an election result that is truly more reflective of the top 5 idols in the game than before (This is still not quite true but you get the idea) and this is doubly so due to the re-introduction of the voice auditions.

Secondly, the remaining passion idols are another thing to consider here. Outside of passion's general poor performance in elections there are other reasons that we will not be expecting any new passion voice for a long time. This is because none of the remaining unvoiced idols have placed top 50 in an election before. With the start of 2020 there was only one passion idol left to ever rank top 50 in an election and that was Reina. With Risa and Reina being forcefully graduated from the unvoiced pool via surprise voices, it leaves us with a pool of passion idols who have never touched the top 50 before. If idols like nanami have ranked in the top 50 prior and still struggle to rank with campaigning as aggressive as it was, this idea can be further generalized to say that the rest of the passion cast do not stand a chance. Remember that nanami was the 2nd place idol in twitter engagement during the voice audition period and many consider her loss to be rather surprising given how much of a campaign presence she had.

A lot of people see the idea of calling passion dead as mockery and making fun of the state of the game, but such is the reality of the situation. When I was lobbying about how this election was the death of passion as we know it, I knew that there was sufficient statistics and reasoning to back this claim up. Despite the push for Sana during the april fools event, that was not enough to push her anywhere close to the top idols. Shinobu also got robbed of any placement in the voice auditions. If idols that have come close before struggle to do it, without any strong external driving forces and factors from that of memes or otherwise it would make it extremely hard to see any passion wins in the present format.

(By the way, I just want to say that Passion has always had a lead of voices although not all of them earned it through sheer popularity alone and many of these passion voices have some popularity issues and hence issues acquiring new content. The current toll is 28 Cute 30 Cool and 33 Passion)

3. The removal of the preliminary results
This was something that I talked a lot about during the election period as well. The basic idea was that the preliminary results don't really do much other than expose the fact that elections have a tendency to have rigged results, so they did away with it. It's a good move for them but not necessarily something that I would say is good for the playerbase. With voting power as significant as it is, where your free votes are equivalent to 0.015% of 10th place, you will be hard pressed to find any meaningful way of using it to cause an impact on the election. The prelims had filled this gap by telling you how to make the most out of your votes in the election if you were still undecided. it was the best time for unvoiced idols to kick into the next gear of campaigning to get their girls in from just outside the border and to rally support.

For two straight years they have been voicing girls who have been just outside the voice border. This trend started with Hotaru in 2018 who placed 4th for Cute and continued with Risa in 2019 who lost narrowly to Natalia. In order to prepare for the content release of the idols later in the year the auditioning of the actual seiyuus happens a lot earlier than the final results, and of course this will prove to be more difficult if the results are not easily predictable even with the mass amount of data namco has on their end. The whole thing about featuring Risa in a 3d anime short was clearly planned for a while. While the production time for a CM is a lot shorter than that of an anime it could also be theorized that they expected hotaru to get in for the election prior. (The latest CM set only started recording after Glowing Rock, according to Mirei's seiyuu on Derepa) It was also conveniently a year where not a single cute idol had managed to break past the cute wall. Long story short this removal of the preliminary results is something that helps scamco in the long run, and there are several reasons for it.

First of all it gives them more accurate results about the relative popularity of the idols. It is undeniable how crucial the election is for scamco every year, both in keeping the games alive and also in giving them valuable statistics to help them plan out content for the next year or two. By not releasing preliminary results it allows them to avoid the data being swung by the 2nd wave of campaigning. This helps them preserver the predictability of the results on their end and also plan out which characters they would need to get auditioned without allowing the community to easily influence their plans.

Second of all it hides the auditioning process and makes it something that is opaque to the community. We wouldn't be able to come to conclusions on when the seiyuus for the characters are auditioned if it weren't for the results of the elections and prelims to draw conclusions. By removing preliminary results they are effectively removing a large data point for us to base any factual analysis off which makes it harder to interpret the reasons behind some of the releases scamco does. If surprise voices were to become too predictable they wouldn't be surprise voices anymore.

Finally preliminary results would also speak volumes about the state of the voice elections. There are two possible outcomes here. The relatively neutral one here is where the idols in the prelim results are the same as the idols that eventually win. This is not a bad outcome for most people involved, although it will probably be discouraging for those outside of the border to see that none of their campaigning had any influence on the result. However, this result is very unlikely, with any preliminary result the border is something that is hard fought over. Characters on the border rarely retain their ranking without fighting really hard for it. The more likely and more negative outcome is the one where the voiced idols are different from the preliminary results. This becomes an indication to the community that these idols that were booted from the results are the ones that probably narrowly missed the mark. With the great lengths that scamco has gone through to hide this information other than the 3 voiced idols we were getting it would certainty hurt them more than help their overall game plan in this case if preliminary results were a thing.

4. Syuko Syndrome
Coming off that last point this would probably be a good place to talk about this since its a common point of discussion. The background is this: During the first voice elections Syuko was the first place idol in the preliminary results but finished 2nd in the final result, losing out to Arisu. At that time only the first place idol got voiced so many people were ingrained with the idea that Syuko got robbed. In the very next election, Syuko became the first unvoiced idol in an extremely long time to get first place (241,011 votes in the 4th election) and then has pretty much no-showed every election since or made cameo appearances at about rank 45+.

Many people were fearful of voice elections resulting in this behavior and history repeating itself. In fact plenty of people theorized that this was the reason that voice elections were never run again after the very first one.

The question on everyone's mind is really: Was this the sole reason that the voice auditions did not reveal any rankings outside of the 3? Now I will not throw out this theory completely but I will say that there are likely plenty of reasons for the exclusion other than this one. Let us talk about one of them

5. Putting the surprise back in surprise voices
One of the reasons for hiding the results outside of the top 3 is to allow surprise voices to be surprising. Let us suppose we knew the top 7 not voiced idols. It would be way too predictable if they started voicing them from rank 4 all the way to rank 10. It would also be a political nightmare for them to introduce surprise voices outside of ranking order. This was not a problem for them before since generally they normal elections were not purely representative of relative unvoiced popularity. However, when the election pool is restricted to just unvoiced idols, in this extremely specific context the meaning of the ranking drastically changes. To avoid any possible backlash from the future content releases and possible surprise voices it is indeed in their best interest to avoid releasing the results.

6. Vote inflation
This is another major point to cover since it affects a lot of the numbers and how we see the numbers. It is no secret that every year the number of votes keeps going up almost exponentially.

Airi 79,256

Ranko 391,769

Rin 253,329

Syuko 241,001

Uzuki 1,066,037

Kaede 1,063,033

Nana 2,307,719

Mio 3,075,522

Karen 16,926,974

First of all let us go through why vote inflation exists to begin with.

Vote inflation serves multiple purpose the first of which primarily is to mask the amount of active players there are in the game at the moment. If the vote count had remained the same every year it would be easy to draw conclusions on the health of the playerbase just by looking at the numbers at a glance. It also will make it easy to tell which one of the first place idols are more popular. We all know that the nature of all games is to decline from release without any new major events to spark interest in the general public. Although we can judge the number of active players from the events and know the general downward trend. (Less than 300,000 players during a New Generations event anyone?)

By constantly playing with the voting power of the player it achieves another knock on effect of looking more impressive. Humans are often easily fascinated by large numbers and my 16 million does sound a lot more impressive than 79 thousand. I mean that's how they're marketing mice with 160,000 DPI and screens with 10 billion colors right? The same effect applies here, the number in itself is purely arbitrary since what matters more is the amount of people who have voted for the idol and the amount of money required to reach that number, but the process of inflating votes more rapidly than the monetary inflation of the real world has the effect of making this process non-trival and also looks better when published all over twitter. This is good for the game, its good publicity for them when someone who has never heard of this game sees that some virtual character has 16 million votes. Being completely clueless they'd be drawn towards the conclusion that they are extremely popular. Which while not a complete fabrication is a different meaning from "16 million people voted for this idol" which is the narrative that the inflated number helps cultivate.

Next let's take a look at exactly how much was the vote inflated by. Comparisons are relative to last year

Mobamasu Free Votes: Relatively unchanged

Deresute Free Votes: Approximately 7x More

Mobamasu Paid Votes: 30x More

Deresute Free Votes: 30x More

Buying votes in mobamasu also had the mechanics changed. you no longer have to roll the current gacha to obtain votes which avoids election rigging via mobamasu gacha boxes. You can buy votes with gacha tickets that are apparently as good as mobacoins which means you can even get the scout ticket with that.

This means that compared to last year, your votes are worth 4x less compared to that of a paying player, now this is no surprise since obviously the whole point of the elections is to find girls who people are willing to spend money on.

Previous years there would be an issue with the gacha and event during the elections for mobamasu due to how the voting works. Since it requires rolling the immediate box it means that people who are invested in characters that appeared during election season would get a huge boost. This is commonly known in the English world as "rigging" where namco pushes out content for a girl who's on the edge of ranking. The new system eliminates this problem. The change itself is an interesting point to consider since it is kind of like leaving a lot of money on the table for them. In my opinion this is probably doable for them because of the lack of preliminary results release as well, because there would be no need for them to push another idol content to boost their results.

While I am unsure if this is a direct correlation with the whole thing with mobamasu content slowing down in terms of production pace that was announced a while back, it definitely seems like the change in the set helps make it more likely that the results are not swayed by the present event and gacha in mobamasu as heavily as before. All things considered here it seems like the they really wanted the election results this time around to be about as pure as possible. It could be due to the fact that we're approaching 10th anniversary that they want to do a good stocktake on the current situation of the idols in order to be able to make plans going forward.

7. Akira's miracle run
This was probably the most unexpected thing of the election to me. I anticipated that with the way that the trends were going we were going to see akari solidly in 1st place with the other slots being hard fought over the remainder of the pack. Akira on the other hand had stunned many to pull within a million votes of Akari which was something that I had not foresaw. Until today I'm still not quite sure what exactly was the driving force behind her election run. We knew about the meme potential of taberungo no uta on nico and how that seem to have solidly carried over from January all the way into election period and that was going to be the key in securing first place for akari. However, I'm unaware of any large shifts in trends that would help explain the amount of success behind akira's election push.

(Please do not come to me telling me about how some english tweet with 10 RTs about akira is carrying her election success, I'm looking for big pushes among the JP side that are on the scale of taberungo [1.6m views] or otherwise)

Tsukasa was not the most surprising candidate to get 3rd place. She may not be very well known among the english community but there is actually a very good reason why she's the only non-seasonal unvoiced SSR in the game. Her popularity in JP has been relatively strong in the last few elections and it was only a matter of time before she would eventually get voiced, if not this year probably in the next.

8. Fishing for a Nanami and why Campaigning isnt the same as producing results and dumping money.
Another thing that is hot on the discussion block is Nanami's "shocking" defeat in the voice audition polls. Many people had expected her to perform strongly in the polls due to the good showing on the twitter trackers. I myself had fallen victim to this bait. Let me explain why it turned out this way.

Credit where it's due, NanamiPs have put in a great deal of effort into election campaigning this year. I dare say this was probably one of the most comprehensive election campaigns that they have conducted and it really shows. The english side of the community are also Nanami sympathizers due to the group of warriors in the english side of the fanbase also trying to engage this end of the community with the election campaign material. (I won't be talking about this much further since I refuse to believe that foreign votes have much impact on the overall outcome of the election at the moment) Between the huge engagement caused by very-definitely-not-staff Mond's illustration and animations and the constant collaborative voting events on the nanamiP side it would be hard to exist on JP twitter and say that you have not seen any signs of Nanami and the extent of the push they were making.

However, just making a bunch of noise is not enough to win an election. Reality might teach you otherwise, but I assure you this is how it works here The reason why nanami's loss seems particularly shocking is just the dystopia between the amount of election and campaign material vs the actual produced result. Relatively speaking its almost as if TsukasaPs cruised to the top 3 given how much less noise they were making over the whole election campaign period. If you had seen the amount of attention NanamiPs were attracting and saw the stats to back it up you were sold there and then. This expectation of great results from nanami is what eventually sets you up for the shock of her defeat. For no other idol you could say this for, because for no other idol did you see nearly as intense of a campaign. Maybe for Akari but Akari didn't lose. Had she lost the reaction probably would have been similar.

Closing thoughts
I feel like I have written a lot here. There is a lot more I can go on about but the average reader probably already lost me at the first paragraph so I should wrap this up at some point.

This has been an election with a lot of changes, most of them political, not all of them positive but if anything this system at least does one thing well. It serves the intended purpose of giving us the idol of the year by popularity. Sure this popularity might be short lived, but it is at least not majorly influenced by rigged content like specific mobamasu gachas or otherwise. Sure the voice elections may be questionable and the whole thing of shoehorning the duo of akira and akari into the commu of riamu seems like a questionable act of a foregone conclusion. In my opinion it would have been more interesting to see akira bordered out of the election to see if they would surprise voice her due to plans getting foiled. There's no knowing what they are planning to do with this data, but if anything is for sure there's one thing. We won't be expecting any passion voices anytime soon.

Is it surprising, after all this is over, to say that the election is no more than clown politics in an imaginary model about imaginary idols using real money to manipulate votes? Not really. But I think that this is a good thing for the series in general. The money generated from the elections is undoubtedly giving them a lot of funding that they are able to keep the game alive and invest into producing better content, and at the end of the day that's all I really want from this series. If we could have more live band, maybe a live orchestra or something else crazy in the next lives. More high quality compositions, more fantastic voice actresses that are paid and treated well, then there's nothing terribly wrong with how the franchise operates. Questionable methodology for sure but at the end of the day the thing I like to say about imas is that you can see your money being spent on actually producing better content which is not something that I can say about a lot of franchises in the world today where the bottom line outweighs all else.