What is the fairest way to judge a local art challenge without bias?

[LarryL]

I’m trying to organize a small art challenge for our local online group and I’m stuck on how to pick the winners fairly. I want to avoid just having people vote for their friends, but I also don’t want to be the sole judge. Has anyone run something similar and found a good middle ground for the judging process?

[Luke7]

Yeah, I ran a similar thing last fall. Submissions were blind to the judges. We used three local artists as the panel who didn't know the entrants. Each judge scored on a 0–5 scale across concept, execution, originality, presentation, and mood. We averaged the scores and then opened a short top five for an anonymous audience poll that counted for a smaller share of the final decision.

[Daniel_L]

I tried rotating judges so no single person held the power, and kept things anonymous. People would still chat privately about favorites, so we paused comments on the main thread and stuck to the rubric. It cooled things down a bit but didn’t erase little cliques.

[David.J]

I've learned that the problem might not be bias but consistency. Different judges value things differently, so we settled on one fixed rubric and a clear submission standard, which helped a bit. Still, a few folks slipped through because of presentation quality that hid weaker ideas.

[IsabellaJG]

Do you actually need a winner, or is the point just to showcase the talent and spark convo? Not sure, I bounce between different formats.