On April 23, the 61st Baeksang Arts Awards announced 10 days of voting for the PRIZM Popularity category through the PRIZM application.
PRIZM Popularity (popularity award) is equivalent to the most popular actor award, because this is the category that selects the winner completely from the audience's voting results, not based on the judges' evaluation like other professional awards.
With Baeksang receiving more than 11 million votes for the popularity award for the 60th time in 2024 - recording the highest number of votes in the past 3 years, the 2025 season also promises to be a fierce competition.
This year, 35 actors and 35 actresses are on the list of voters. The actor and actress with the highest number of votes will win this category and be honored at the awards ceremony taking place on May 5.
After the first 4 days, the popularity Baeksang race has been very exciting, as the rankings are gradually being shaped by faces with an outstanding number of votes, especially in the list of 35 actresses.
As of April 27, the total number of votes for 70 candidates has exceeded last year's 11 million. The women's team alone has accounted for nearly 10 million.
Leading with Hyeri with 3.4 million votes, Kim Hye Yoon ranked 2nd with 2.9 million votes and IU followed closely in 3rd place with 2.7 million votes.
Initially, the audience rated this as an unusual result, because these 3 actresses are all faces with movies that caused a fever in 2024 and early 2025.
Kim Hye Yoon is the female lead of the historical romance film Lovely Runner. IU played 2 roles in "When Life Gives You Tangerines". IU and Kim Hae Yoon were even nominated for Best Actress at Baeksang 2025.
Hyeri made an impression when playing the role of an unstable female genius in the mystery thriller Friendly Rivalry, which caused a fever in many Asian countries, especially the Chinese market.
However, on April 26, a post appeared on the online community theqoo denouncing the cheating behavior of fans voting for Baeksang's Popularity award, attracting more than 60,000 reads.
The poster released evidence that voters used macro (automation of repetitive operations) to support voting.
This has made Korean netizens suspect that the 2-3 million votes of Hyeri, Kim Hye Yoon and IU are the result of fraud. Because their votes are too different from the others. Other actors only received a few tens of thousands of votes, or more than a few hundred thousand votes.
Netizens left many indignant comments: "What does a celebrity award mean if they cheat like this?", "It's really embarrassing", "It's better to give up the favorite award"...
Many audiences even asked Baeksang to remove Hyeri, IU and Kim Hye Yoon from the popularity award nomination list for fan cheating.
In addition, others expressed disappointment with Baeksang because the organizers could not control fraudulent votes like this.
Meanwhile, in the actor category, Byeon Woo Seok is leading with about 1 million votes, 2nd place is Park Bo Gum with 367,000 votes, and 3rd place is Jung Hae In with 119,000 votes.
