Proportional Oscars
Every year the LA Times faithfully does a story about the Oscar nomination process. Here is this year’s.
This is an interesting application of the single transferable vote. Next year I should pay more attention to movies so I can write something intelligent about the preference flows.
Does anybody know what surplus transfer method they use? One reader is asking that question in the comments.
Bob Richard on 18 Dec 2007 at 1:19 pm #
The most interesting thing about the Academy Award story is that they use plurality for the final round — with five candidates and usually more than two viable candidates. This makes the choice of STV for selecting the panel of finalists seem odd to me.
On the STV procedure used, I’ve heard two stories. One is the Los Angeles Times article (see below). The other is from someone who claims to know someone at the accounting firm, who says they use fractional transfers. The Academy’s rules say only that “In the nominations voting, the marking and tabulation of all ballots shall be according to the preferential or weighted average system.” The way I read this, it allows the accounting firm to do all kinds of things, include “bottoms up” and various flavors of “multi-seat IRV”.
In my reading of newspaper article, it describes the random transfer method in which the randomization takes place before any ballots are counted. (Usually, this is done by shuffling them and then writing serial numbers on them in the randomized order.) Once a candidate reaches the threshold, you stop transferring more ballots to that candidate and start giving them to the next-ranked candidate on each one.
Another main variation on random transfers is the Cincinnati-Cambridge method, where you continue assigning votes to candidates who have already reached the threshold. After all ballots have been assigned, you calculate the fraction of the winner’s ballots that need to be transferred, 1/N, and then transfer every Nth ballot.
Jack on 18 Dec 2007 at 2:16 pm #
Thanks, Bob. I’m not surprised that the rules aren’t more specific. Lots of non-governmental STV elections seem to rely on the external authority of tabulators when it comes to tie-breaking and surplus transfers.