The 2022 MAMA Awards has released a statement concerning fraudulent votes following suspicions that the votes of some artists nominated for the Worldwide Fans' Choice Top 10 were rigged. See their full statement below.

2022 MAMA Awards Issues Statement About Fraudulent Votes Following Suspicions of Rigging

On Nov. 4, the 2022 MAMA Awards posted an announcement on its official website. In their statement, they ask the fans to vote properly and reveal that they will remove fraudulent votes in the final tally.

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The full statement is as follows:

"In order to ensure that the voices of K-pop artists and their global fans who are cheering on and supporting their favorite artists can be reflected properly, please follow appropriate voting practices. The 'MAMA Awards' will also do its best.

The '2022 MAMA Awards' voting currently being held by Mnet Plus is being thoroughly verified step by step to ensure that a transparent and fair voting takes place throughout the entire process from joining membership to opening and closing of voting.

The entire voting process discloses the total number of votes and the percentage of votes per artist in real time so that all global K-pop fans can see it.

In addition, data identified as fraudulent voting during the monitoring process will be excluded from the final aggregation.

In the Worldwide Fans' Choice category, the Vote nominees are selected by adding all the data aggregated through Mnet Plus, Spotify, Twitter, and YouTube.

We ask for your cooperation in creating a proper voting culture so that the voices of K-pop artists and global K-pop fans who support these artists can be reflected honestly in the voting process.

MAMA Awards will carry out the utmost efforts."

The official statement from the 2022 MAMA Awards came after people suspected that the votes of some artists nominated for the Worldwide Fans' Choice Top 10 were being rigged.

Supposed Proofs of Vote Rigging for 2022 MAMA Awards Surface

On Nov. 3, one netizen created a post on the online community Instiz to compare the vote graphs of some of the nominees for the Worldwide Fans' Choice Top 10. They pointed out that groups like IVE, Kep1er, Dreamcatcher, LOONA, and Brave Girls have seen a significant increase in voting in the past few days.

Based on the graphs, these five groups appeared to have an average vote of 5,000 in the first days, but then they surprisingly got more than 10,000 views this week. This huge spike pushed all five teams in the top 20, with Dreamcatcher and LOONA surpassing TWICE and all five groups having more votes than BLACKPINK, as of Nov. 4.

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On the other hand, the graphs for groups like BLACKPINK, BTS, Stray Kids show patterns that seem to be consistent with evident moments of momentum.

Because of the irregular voting patterns shown in the graphs for IVE, Kep1er, LOONA, Dreamcatcher, and Brave Girls, fans believe that vote rigging has occurred.

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Other than that, another netizen shared a photo showing the votes for IVE and Brave Girls on TheQoo. It can be seen that the two artists have the same number of votes in multiple instances, making netizens more suspicious.

The netizen also shared a graph presenting the votes of Dreamcatcher, LOONA, Kep1er, Brave Girls, IVE, and MAMAMOO. It's clear that all six artists had the same level of votes in the first days, but then all of them except MAMAMOO saw a huge increase in votes on Nov. 1 and 2.

Do you think vote rigging is taking place in the Worldwide Fans' Choice Top 10?

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Written by Maria Scott