IRV and the Oscars: How Best Picture is Chosen

Now that nominations for the 83rd Academy Awards have been announced and the final stretch has begun in earnest, pundits and prognosticators have begun dialing in their predictions for the most prominent awards. Perhaps none of these categories attracts more speculation than the coveted Best Picture award. With ten candidates vying for the top spot, the race promises to be wide-open and thrilling.

Given the number of high-quality films this year, odds are that plenty of critics will see their sure-fire pick for Best Picture end up on the wrong side of a post-announcement reaction shot on the night of the ceremony. But fortunately, to help ensure that the winner truly reflects the preferences of Academy voters , the Best Picture award is selected by instant runoff voting.

Instant runoff voting comes with a handful of names: preferential voting in Australia, ranked choice voting in some American cities using it and the alternative vote in the United Kingdom. The adoption of IRV earned a lot of attention last year, including coverage in a USA Today editorial and Vanity Fair. This year it again is drawing coverage. Famed numbers guru Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight.com and The New York Times, posted fascinating article on Tuesday explaining the instant runoff process and showing what outcome of the race for the night’s biggest award would be if the nation’s critics were the voters. It’s highly recommended reading for those interested in a quantitatively grounded perspective on how the contest might play out.

For those who are new to instant runoff voting, here is how the system works – with a series of “instant runoffs” that simulate what would happen if everyone were asked to vote again after the last-place finisher were eliminated before each round of voting:

1. Voters rank candidates in order of preference on their ballot.

2. First choices are counted. If any candidate is ranked 1st on a majority of ballots, then that candidate is declared the winner and the election is over. If not, then the counting process goes on.

3. The candidate ranked 1st on the fewest number of ballots is eliminated. Each of these ballots is counted instead for the candidate ranked 2nd on that ballot.

4. The redistributed ballots are added to the totals of the remaining candidates. If any candidate has over 50% of the ballots in play (the original 1st choices and the redistributed 2nd choices), then that candidate is declared the winner. If not, then the counting process continues.

5. The remaining candidate ranked 1st on the smallest number of ballots is again eliminated. Each of these ballots is counted instead for the candidate ranked 2nd on that ballot. If the candidate ranked 2nd has been eliminated, then the ballot is counted for the candidate ranked 3rd, and so forth.

6. This process of eliminating candidates and redistributing ballots continues until one candidate secures over 50% of the ballots in play.

Thanks to the system, the winner that emerges will accurately represent the preferences of academy voters.

There’s of course no “perfect” voting system, but IRV is a terrific system for handling more than two choices – both because no Oscar voter is going to be able to “trick” the system with insincere voting and because it upholds majority rule. To win an IRV election, a candidate must have support that is both broad and deep: the film must attract strong first-choice support from its enthusiasts while continuing to pick up ballots from supporters of other films who consider it a worthy 2nd or 3rd choice. In the end, the film that is the most strongly and widely by Academy voters liked will be crowned Best Picture.

Because IRV is new to many people, however, some can misunderstand its impact. Some Oscar observers are suggesting that only agreeable,broadly-liked pictures can now win because they don’t understand how important it is to have a strong first choice vote as well as appeal as a second choice. Others think that voters should try to outsmart the system by only voting for one film or perhaps changing the order of their choices, not realizing that a lower-ranked choice never counts against your top-ranked choice and that it would be foolhardy not to rank movies in your true order of choice.

In last year’s Oscars, for example, The Hurt Locker was an upset winner over Avatar, and some observers suggested that IRV must have been the reason. But the fact is that The Hurt Locker’s director Kathryn Bigelow also won the Oscar for Best Director in a plurality vote, clearly not needing IRV to win. The outcome means that in a one-on-one race between the The Hurt Locker and Avatar, it’s highly likely that The Hurt Locker would have won – e.g., it would have been ranked ahead of Avatar on more ballots. That’s an obviously sensible standard to use when picking Best Picture of the year.

Check back in the coming days for more on the race, including our own interactive Best Picture poll. And for more information on instant runoff voting, visit FairVote and instantrunoff.com.

The Oscar Nominations Reflect Diverse Views -- and the Race is On

Reflecting the choice voting method that doesn't allow any one faction of Academy voters to dominate the nomination process, a range of films earned one of the ten nominations for Best Picture this morning. The web is buzzing with news and analysis, with The King's Speech earning 12 nominations across the many Oscar categories, followed by True Grit with 10 nominations and The Social Network and Inception with 8.

In addition to The King's Speech, The Social Network and True Grit, seven motion pictures earned nominations for Best Picture, with a mix of Hollywood blockbusters and well-reviewed independent films with relatively minor budgets: Black Swan, The Fighter, True Grit, Kids Are All Right, 127 Hours, Toy Story 3 and Winter’s Bone.

As detailed in our post on the Oscar nomination voting progress, the Academy has relied on the choice voting method of proportional voting for more than a half century, realizing that it ensures a mix of nominees reflecting the full diversity of Academy voters' preferences. It must be working: the Oscar telecast is often the most watched program around the world.

How Oscar Nominees are Selected: Explaining choice voting

On Tuesday, January 25 at 8:30 am, we will learn which achievements have been nominated for each of the 2010 Academy Awards. This announcement, a precursor to the dramatic moment when the final envelopes will be torn open on the night of the ceremony, marks the end of the opening phase of Oscar season and the beginning of the home stretch. It also reflects the results of a nominating election among the 5,755 members of the academy using a proportional representation system known as choice voting or "single transferable vote." Referred to by academy officials as “preferential voting,” choice voting is designed to accommodate a large number of candidates while accurately reflecting the preferences of academy voters. It has been used to for Oscar nominations for more than six decades.

Although choice voting has gotten some bemused attention in the press – Kevin Fallon of the Atlantic calls it a “quirky” method that makes nominations hard to predict -- but despite a few Oscar-specific twists, the system isn’t all that complicated. With an eye to dispelling confusion, here is how the nominations work:

The 5,500 voting members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) are divided into voting groups based on their professional specialty. In the nominating elections, these groups vote only for candidates within their specialty – i.e. actors vote to nominate actors, directors to nominate directors, etc. Only in the Best Picture category do all 5,755 academy members get to vote in the nominating contest.

Each voter receives a ballot with five numbered slots for each category in which the voter is eligible to participate -- except in the case of Best Picture, for which 10 nominees are selected. Although each member gets only one vote, he or she is entitled to choose up to five potential nominees in order of preference (10 for Best Picture).

As explained in FairVote's choice voting video, all ballots are counted to see if any candidate receives a sufficient share of 1st choice rankings to guarantee a nomination: the "victory threshold." The victory threshold is the minimum share of the vote needed to secure a nomination. With ten nominees for Best Picture, the victory threshold is 1/11th of the vote plus one additional vote (or about 9.1%). With five nominees, the victory threshold is 1/6th (or 16.7%) plus one vote.

To see why this number is the victory threshold, imagine a race in which five – and only five – candidates receive exactly enough votes to garner a nomination. What is the fewest number of votes that each nominee could receive while still retaining more votes than every candidate that missed the cut? You might say 1/5th, or 20%, since there are 5 slots available. But the number can go even lower. Let’s say each of the 5 nominated films receives 1/6 of the vote plus one additional vote. This means that when we add up the total number of votes received by each of the 5 nominees, we get 5/6 of the total vote plus 5 additional votes. We notice that less than 1/6th of the vote remains to be distributed among all other candidates outside the top 5. This eliminates the possibility of any candidate outside of the top 5 receiving a share that ties any of the top 5 candidates, since any remaining candidate will necessarily have less than the 1/6 of the vote. Therefore 1/6th plus one vote is the minimum share of the vote per nominee needed to fill the top 5 in the first round, and any candidate in a category with five nominations receiving that share will automatically qualify as a nominee.

If any candidates cross the victory threshold, then they are selected as nominees and one of the five nomination slots is filled (with ten nominees now for Best Picture). But it would be quite unlikely that every slot would be filled in the first round. If open slots for nominations, voters’ backup choices are taken into account according to the following steps:

- The nominees that have passed the victory threshold are elected, and any excess votes beyond that threshold are distributed to the next choice on that ballot. Suppose, for example, The Social Network was the first choice of 20% of Academy voters. That number of votes would be enough for two nominations, so it's important to allow those voters to help pick two of the ten nominees, not just one. So about half of the value of each ballot goes to second choices at an equally reduced value while half of that value remains to nominate The Social Network. (There are different ways of distributing these surplus votes -- sometimes with a random selection of ballots, -- but having ballot count for a next choice at an equally reduced value is the fairest approach.)

- In most choice voting elections, the victory threshold remains constant, with the last winner sometimes falling short of it due to not every voter using all their potential rankings. According to Oscar analyst Steve Pond, the Academy keeps lowering the threshold after each winner to keep as many ballots in play as possible. Thus, if two actors have been nominated, and three remain, the threshold now becomes 1/4th of the remaining votes (meaning those votes not helping to nominate the first winner) plus one. This adjustment happens after each new nominee is selected.

- After all surplus votes are distributed, it is still likely that not all the nomination slots will be filled. At that point, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated. All ballots ranking that candidate as a top choice are counted instead for the candidate ranked next on that ballot.

- If these additional ballots push any candidates above the nomination threshold, then those candidates are selected as nominees. The process is repeated, with more candidates eliminated and their ballots redistributed until five candidates have been pushed above the number needed to advance.

(For those interested in reading more about the process of selecting nominees through the eyes of an expert on Oscar voting and history, check out Steve Pond’s article from the last Oscar season at The Wrap. This week, we will know the outcome of this selection process, and speculation about the eventual winners will begin in earnest. Here at OscarVotes123.com, we will be paying close attention to the other aspect of the Oscars’ “preferential voting” system – the use of instant runoff voting to determine the winner of the Best Picture category. Stay tuned!

Welcome back!

With nominations for the 83rd Academy Awards due to be announced on Tuesday, January 25, we at OscarVotes123 welcome you back to our annual coverage of the Oscars!

This blog is dedicated to examining and explaining the voting methods used by the Academy to nominate candidates and select winners. While Academy officials are famously secretive about the selection process, the methods they use are no secret and, in fact, are used in elections by governments and organizations around the world. Join us in the coming days as we pull back the curtain on Oscar voting, explaining the selection process behind the biggest awards in show business.

Hurt Locker Wins Best Picture

And the winner is............. The Hurt Locker! Congratulations to the cinematographers on their award.

The conventional wisdom boiled down to two contenders - Avatar and The Hurt Locker. The speculation is over and a favored film scored the top prize.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters used a preferential ballot with a tabulation system known as Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). As stated in previous posts, IRV is a majority voting system.

Regardless of the speculation, there was much suspense regarding which film would take the big prize. And that's how using IRV paid off for the Academy - they did multiple rounds of tabulations from a single ballot cast by each of the Academy's voters. There was no second, third or subsequent ballot to get a majority - how could you do such an effort and not risk blowing the suspense on Oscar night? No, by using a single preferential ballot, the Academy kept a lid on the winner until the envelope was opened in front of millions of viewers.

Perhaps The Hurt Locker got an outright majority of first choices and no runoff was needed? We'll never know because the Academy chooses to keep its tabulations secret.

The good folks at FairVote Minnesota did their own poll / election for best picture Oscar using IRV and The Hurt Locker won it also!

The Oscars are a promotional tool for movies. The Academy expanded the nominees for best picture from five to ten. Nine films still have the luster of "Nominated for Best Picture". But there still needed to be a majority winner - IRV met the needs of the Academy.

Congratulations are also in order to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on a wonderful awards ceremony.

See you next year at Oscar Votes 123!