New York Times Plurality Ballot

The New York Times has a spiffy site for their poll / voting on the Best Picture Academy Award. All ten nominees are on the ballot but there's something a little wrong - they're using a plurality ballot! Their ballot will show who has the most votes, and could reveal a majority winner - but as of this posting NYT's poll leader The King's Speech is at a 44 percent plurality.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences uses a preferential ballot like the one offered above. Instead of a single choice, a voter ranks their favorite flicks. On our ballot, as of this posting, The King's Speech is at 33 percent of first choices. If you view the results and click on "FINAL ROUND" the film goes on to be the majority winner. What has happened is the app performed a series of runoff elections until one flick, The King's Speech crossed 50 percent + 1 of the votes.

I like the New York Times and read it often. But please, the "paper of record" should at least have a preferential ballot for their mock election! If you want a more realistic Oscar election - use our app above.

For Academy Voters: Four Rules for Voting for Best Picture

With ballots soon to be returned to determine the winners of the Oscars at the Academy Awards, members of the Academy may have questions about the instant runoff voting system used to select the winner of the Best Picture award. Also known as "preferential voting" in Australia, "the alternative vote" in the United Kingdom and "ranked choice voting" in some American cities, instant runoff voting has been used in the Best Picture category since 2009.

Not everything Oscar analysts are saying about the system is accurate, however. Here are four key points for Academy voters to keep in mind when filling out a ranked choice ballot for Best Picture.

1. To vote, you simply rank the nominated movies in order of preference, indicating your first choice, second choice and so on. Voting is literally as easy as “1, 2, 3.’ Oscar ballots are counted according to a straightforward counting procedure that allows voters’ backup choices to be taken into account if their first choice has been defeated. To read about the details of the process, see our earlier post.

2. Voters should rank as their first choice the movie they most want to win and their second choice as their sincere next favorite. A voter should vote sincerely, starting with your first choice, onto your second choice and so on until you are indifferent about the remaining choices. Any effort to help your favorite movie by changing your order of preference is foolhardy and nearly certain to backfire.

3. Rank as many movies as you can without concern about hurting your first choice. A voter’s ballot is only counted for one movie at a time and your second choice will never count against the chances of your first choice. That’s because your vote will only count for your second-choice film if your first-choice film is eliminated from contention. Suppose you really want to see your top choice to win, but its top competitor is your sincere second choice. Ranking that competing movie as your actual second choice will not have any effect on the chances of your first choice winning – rather, it’s only potential impact is to help that second choice defeat the remaining movies.

4. Don't rank the same movie more than once. Ranking a movie multiple times (e.g. as 1st, 2nd and 3rd choice) will not help that candidate’s chances of winning. Because your backup choices only come into play once your first choice has been eliminated, repeated rankings of a movie do nothing to help that movie.

Note: As discussed in this earlier post, there are two different forms of “preferential voting” used by the Academy. The other variation used to select nominations is called choice voting. It is a form of proportional representation designed to nominate potential Oscar winners who reflect the strong preferences of as many Academy voters as possible.

With choice voting for Oscar nominations, passion wins

In the days since the nominations of the 83rd Oscars’ ceremony awards were announced, the entertainment press has written quite a bit about the surprises, along with the usual talk of scandalous snubs. What should be highlighted more, we believe, is the important role of the system used to choose these nominees -- who, no matter matter happens in the final vote, are already winners.

Much attention focuses on the battle for Best Picture, seen by many to be between The King’s Speech and The Social Network, two movies with very different profiles: one telling he story of a king trying to improve his speaking skills in a World War II background while the other telling the story of the more current topic of the early days of Facebook.

But while those movies are the frontrunners, nearly every other nominated film has its advocates. As Jen Chaney for the Washington Post writes:

“Let's just stop arguing, America, and accept the fact that all the movies competing for Oscar's top token of glory are pretty darn good.”

What Chaney doesn’t mention, however, is that this outcome speaks to what it means to use the choice voting form of proportional representation for in the voting for nominations, where winning requires having some people really wanting you as a first choice. Earning a nomination is a “win” in itself, and what we have seen this week is the “fair representation” day of victories: nominees in all categories are winners with at least significant numbers of Academy voters.

Entertainment Week this week also has a revealing and entertaining (if poorly named) article about the Oscar voting nomination rules. The magazine held an election for about 2,000 of its readers who voted for Best Picture. Interestingly, using the same counting rules used by the Academy, eight of its ten winners were the same as nominated by the Academy, which reinforces the basic fairness of the voting method. Writer John’s Young final conclusion is exactly right: “A film or performance doesn’t capture a nomination simply by being liked by everyone — it needs to be loved.”

Like the rest of us, of course, not all Academy voters “love” the same kind of performance or the same kind of movie. Some are more traditional, some more interested in change. Some like a certain acting style, others a different one. The idea for nominations is that at least some people are likely to need to think it was a genuine top performance.. If we take for example the Best Picture category, we can praise the fact that a low budget, less well-known movie like Winter’s Bone can earn nominations along with blockbusters like Inception and Toy Story 3.

Not everyone can win, of course. In the documentary category, for example, the influential documentary Waiting for Superman was not nominated, much to the distress of some of the film’s fans. But as AJ Schnack argues in a recent blogpost on “Unraveling the Myths Behind Superman's Oscar Snub" this week it had real competition:

“A surprise is not a snub. Yes, it was a surprise that Waiting for Superman wasn't on Oscar's final list of 5, but we figured a surprise was coming (we just picked the wrong one) and just because it was surprising doesn't make it a snub. As I wrote on Monday, voters were looking for a passion pick to "stand as the emblem of the exceptionally great year that we just had."

For a movie or an artist, earning a nomination in such a prestigious ceremony is really winning one. Thus, to win a nomination, Academy voters – voting in the category they know best, as all nomination voting is restricted to particular categories of Academy voters except for Best Picture -- must be passionate by their work and voters by their performances. That’s a good thing for Oscar nominations – and is good for representation in legislatures.

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.