The 2022 73rd NHK Kouhaku Uta Gassen included a particular new strategy in viewer voter participation: depending on how long someone had watched the program, the amount of votes a particular user could spend on a team would change, with the increase stack capped at five times the traditional amount.
However it seems like all did not go as planned last night. In a post on January 1st, NHK apologized as viewers complained that they were not in fact able to use this stacking method.
The impact seemed to affect hardest the viewers whose votes should have been increased from 9:20PM onwards. There has been no statement made yet on how this could affect the numbers of votes per team, though given the near 1.1 million vote difference between the two teams it is unlikely that this would change last night’s outcome.
Source: Oricon News
