I can predict how Ken Z's team profited mightily from Buzztime's format. On their screens, Einstein was probably the first name deleted, while it was later, sometimes much, much later on others. I don't understand why this irregular pattern continues, as it has for years.
XT

You are correct sir. BLZBUB also does not understand why this error in the game architecture persists to this day.

Perhaps TTLPKG can explain why this was done to SHOWDOWN, as he was one of the players put on the player's committee to recommend realignment to the game (to cut down on Borging and disadvantageous team play.)

Now that everyone who is clinically sane has moved past this question, it's time for me to weigh in. BLZBUB and LILJOL express an equivalence, or at least a sufficiency, between fact and fairness. I hold both these players in such esteem that I can't permit their shared opinion to pass without dissent.

The original question?

PARTLY TO AVOID MILITARY SERVICE IN HIS NATIVE COUNTRY, HE EMIGRATED TO SWITZERLAND IN 1902:

1. LEO TOLSTOY
2. ALBERT EINSTEIN
3. JOSEPH GOEBBELS
4. BENITO MUSSOLINI
5. GEORG VON TRAPP

To perform a strip of the drop down box, one would need to answer to the following question:

IN WHAT YEAR DID ALBERT EINSTEIN EMIGRATE TO SWITZERLAND?

1. 1879
2. 1896
3. 1902
4. 1905
5. 1921

If this question were to occur in a Countdown, nobody would question it's fairness. But it might also raise an eyebrow. In a life so remarkable, why this particular detail?

You can turn this question, with a similar answer, into parody:

WHICH EVENT OCCURRED IN 1896?

1. THE BOER WAR ENDED
2. MCKINLEY WAS ASSASSINATED
3. QUEEN VICTORIA DIED
4. THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR COMMENCED
5. A TEENAGER NAMED EINSTEIN FAILED TO OBTAIN ADMISSION TO THE SWISS GYMNASIUM OF HIS CHOICE

(Hint: if in doubt, take the longest answer.) The question is fair.

As for Mussolini. what does any well informed 21st C American student of history know about him? In the 1960's, I was taught that he obtained power in 1921, consolidated his position into a dictatorship in 1924, and ruled into 1943, when he was deposed. Thereafter, Hitler set him up in a client state known as the Republic of Salo. Eventually, Mussolini was captured by a Communist cell, shot by a firing squad, and hung by his ankles at the local Esso station.

Did anyone reading this know more? Oh, yes. Mussolini was a vain individual, who enjoyed being photographed, especially in military uniform.

BENITO MUSSOLINI EMIGRATED TO SWITZERLAND IN 1902 FOR ALL THESE ACTIVITIES *EXCEPT*:

1. TEACHING
2. DRAFT DODGING
3. FOUNDING FASCISM
4. STONECUTTING
5. ATTENDING UNIVERSITY

Wikipedia has a fine article on Mussolini. What a contrary individual! I took note of the most attributed sources in Wikipedia's footnotes, and went to the local library, hoping to spook one of them up. Alas, Wikipedia's most cited sources are not in the Dakota County Library System. At present writing, I'm tossing in my hands a biography of Mussolini by an author named Anthony James Joes. This book has all the appurtenances of adult literature (footnotes, index, bibliography), and a handsome collection of photographs. The Dakota County Library serves 400,000 residents. So I inquired of the librarian, how often this book been checked out?

"Oh," she replied, punching buttons. Then smiling up at me: "We acquired the book in 1982, it's been checked out 37 times."

Now, put yourself in the position of some random player, let's call him ANON, surrounded by a score of fellows; or, at a distance of 700 miles, you might select certain MICE, surrounded by half as many players. Or you might combine them, and so have 30 players in aggregate celebrating the easiest 60K of all time. Except that Einstein isn't the answer. The draft dodger in question turns out to be the guy who loved to be photographed in military uniform.

So let's swap out the toxic Einstein and write in some other distractor:

PARTLY TO AVOID MILITARY SERVICE IN HIS NATIVE COUNTRY, HE EMIGRATED TO SWITZERLAND IN 1902:

1. LEO TOLSTOY
2. VI LENIN
3. JOSEPH GOEBBELS
4. BENITO MUSSOLINI
5. GEORG VON TRAPP

Most of us are likely to go for Lenin, but at least the content writer has our attention. Or better yet:

1. GEORGES SOREL
2. NICKOLAI CHERNYSHEVSKY
3. JOSEPH GOEBBELS
4. BENITO MUSSOLINI
5. GEORG VON TRAPP

That Mussolini was a draft dodger is such an extraordinary fact that most of us would still fight shy of the correct answer. For a content writer to drop Einstein in as a distractor displays an interplay of naivete and sadism, not unlike a very young child tearing the wings off a butterfly and dropping it on an ant hill, just to see how it shall behave.

I've written several dozen questions in keeping with Buzztime's format, with the five item drop down box, primarily to shock and scandalize the fictional cotery of triviots who congregate at a fictional saloon in a fictional town. Buzztime's original question looks like something I would have written, to illustrate some vanishing literary conceit. Fairness is out the window. Many of these questions are too strange to present to a public even as well informed as this thread's readers. I was also sitting with CARO and ARKUAT in a group of three on February 4, 2014, when Buzztime presented that CARO was the only player in the eastern split who recognized Lima Syndrome as the contrapositive (sic) of Stockholm Syndrome; and so we landed the only three 50K scores on the HOF. The results were described, by a commentator on that quiz, as the lowest scoring Showdown in at least four years. Three years later, REBEL, playing in Phoenix, was the only player to breach 50K nationwide. A 7 year low?

I'm pleased to report that, in the most recent quiz, I confused Catherine de Medici with Marie de Medici, and Henry IV, who wasn't in the drop down box, with Louis Quatorze, and so flatlined for the second week in a row. The difference is, the latter question was fair.

As a graduate of Whatsamatta U., I gotta say What???