gkelly, I'm not sure professional judges are the only solution to the problem. I think you can still have judges originate from national federations, but that the federations then need to be divorced from the selection of big event judges. I'm not sure the ISU has the budget to pay judges much, and that too could lead to conflict of interest.
That's probably one reason such suggestions have never gotten off the ground with the ISU.
The other main reason would be that small federations won't vote for it, out of fear that all the jobs would go to judges from big federations.
I'm probably a broken record on this but if the judges are asked/required to explain each mark in a 3-4 sentence reply...wouldn't it be harder to cheat. At the very least we'll see how cheating is justified and adjust the rules.
3-4 sentences for each mark for every skater? It would take days to write up the reports. Especially for judges who learned English only for judging purposes and have no need to write English anywhere else in their lives.
Maybe just take good enough notes in whatever shorthand they like to use so that they can write at least one word (up to a whole paragraph if appropriate) for each GOE and at least one sentence but often a whole paragraph for each component. Only for the medalists, and any other controversial skater the referee requests explanations on?
ITA with divorcing the Feds from selecting judges to the panels!
So how could this work?