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!

Some Search For Perfect Election System

There’s a good story in today’s Congress.org about IRV and the Academy Awards. It was a balanced article and I want to address some of the opposing comments. No election system is perfect, but that doesn’t stop critics from piling on IRV.

Anthony Gierzynski was quoted that with IRV;

"You start overwhelming voters and you start losing people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale,"

I hope that doesn’t mean that Americans are stupider than Australians or the Irish? I don’t think so.

Look at the situation where I live in Washington’s 3rd Congressional district. There’s an open US House seat where there are currently nine candidates running. That could mean that SW Washingtonians have an overwhelming number of choices on the ballot. But at least they’ll get only one choice in the primary – and that could hopefully soothe any fractured psyches.

But hey, Washington State has a two-round majority voting system. This means that if your first choices loses the August primary, you the voter, get a second choice in the November general election.

And perverse results? With nine candidates in the race – so far – that means the threshold to get into the top-two runoff is 11 percent. A candidate seemingly not favored to win can get into the general. KKK leader David Duke has gotten into the runoff and even elected in the Louisiana top-two majority voting system. The separate runoff is supposed to act like a “safety valve” where an extremist candidate like Duke cannot win the election itself when squared against another candidate in the general.

But he did get elected. Elections produce winners and losers – just because you don’t like the winner doesn’t mean you should dog-pile criticisms on the election rules. It’s like IRV has to somehow be more than perfect.

Then there’s Joyce McCloy and her wrecking ball style of political activism. Indeed, no election system is perfect – but neither is McCloy’s reasoning. Here’s her quote;

There will be people that lack confidence in the outcome, because whoever gets the most first choice votes may not win," McCloy said. "Whichever movie is the most mediocre could win, because it could get the most second- or third-place votes

Oh brother! First, IRV makes results that overwhelms voters, and now the results are mediocre! These criticisms are much like a handful of boiled spaghetti – throw it at a wall and see what sticks. IRV is new to most voters and the goal of these critics is to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Instead of conjecture regarding primary / general election dynamics, let’s look at what a University of Washington study on IRV says;

"In summary, one criticism leveled against RCV / IRV – that candidates who do not obtain the most votes in the initial iteration of voting can go on to win the election outright – is also a function of a traditional primary and general election dynamics."

I put the emphasis in bold because it brings us back to the point I made in the example regarding the open seat in Washington’s 3^rd CD. Would it be a big deal if the second place winner in the primary won the general election? And would any winner be mediocre? Perhaps to the many voters who will vote a second choice in the general election! And even if they were somehow mediocre - just like the article says – “whether or not that scenario is bad is a matter of opinion”

IRV is a majority voting system with similar characteristics as a two-round runoff. There was a need for IRV with the Academy Awards. And if voters think there’s a need for it in pubic elections, it will happen – as it does in places that use it. This is neither mediocre nor overwhelming, it just is.

Looking At Majority Voting Systems

Who will win the Academy Award for Best Picture? According to the new rules for the Oscars, a majority of Academy members will decide.

This year there are ten nominees for Best Picture – the rules were changed from the previous number of five. With this wider field, I can see how the ballot tabulation rules needed to be reconsidered. With the old plurality system, ten nominees meant the threshold to win would have been 10% +1. That means a film with little support among members could win the Oscar.

This morning’s award announcements give us an opportunity look at majority voting systems. One way to conduct this kind of election is through multiple ballots. If there’s no majority on the first count, the last place vote getter is dropped off the list and ballots with the remaining nine are given to voters. If there’s no majority on the second ballot, the last place vote getter is dropped off the list and new ballots with the eight remaining nominees are given to voters. This process would continue until a majority (50% +1) picks the Best Picture.

Multiple ballots work good in places like meetings, conventions -where people are together. But when ballots need to be mailed to voters, the logistics can be cumbersome. Washington State has a majority voting system that winnows candidates down to the top two vote getters. There’s a primary election followed by another Top-Two election at a later date.

With either of these systems, some voters, whose first choice was knocked out in a round of counting, have to then consider a second choice on a later ballot. To accommodate this dynamic, the Academy used a preferential ballot. Voters rank their choices on a single ballot. For example, you put “Avatar” as your first choice and “The Hurt Locker” as second, “District Nine” as third and so on down the ballot. This way, Academy members are mailed a single ballot. And tabulation is basically the same; if there’s a majority on first count, the election is over. If not, the last place vote getter is dropped and that nominee's voters second, third and subsequent choices are distributed to the films remaining in the counting. This process continues until the majority threshold is met.

With expanding the number of nominees for an Oscar, the Academy needed to look at voting methods. Ranked ballots didn't create all the choices - it only accommodates them. And by giving members choices by preference, a voter can feel invested in more films. It's like. "Heck, my first choice lost but I did rank the winner high on my ballot so I'm happy."

Krist Novoselic serves as Chair of FairVote Board of Directors.

IRV versus Sandra Bullock?

Livejournaler Pigeonrat has a good grasp of the implications of the new instant runoff voting system being used by the Motion Picture Academy to choose their Best Picture winner. After Sandra Bullock's Golden Globes win, Pigeonrat wonders if IRV, if applied to Best Actor/Actress might not give us a better idea of who really deserves the performance awards.

Imagine that there are 100 voters, and only three nominees: Sandra, Gabbie, and Carey. Of those 100 voters, 40 believe Sandra should win, and 60 believe that either Gabbie or Carey should win, but that either of them would be better than Sandra. In other words, 60 of the 100 voters believe that ANYONE but Sandra should win.

After seeing how IRV changes the dynamics, Pigeonrat shows how IRV gives us a consensus winner: the actress taking home the award will not be the one disliked by most voters. We'll only get to see IRV in play for Best Picture, but perhaps folks will like the result and decide it can be applied more broadly. We'll see!

Producers Guild Uses IRV to Pick 'Hurt Locker'

Catch your breath -- it can be quite overwhelming, award show after award show. What will the this or that award by the something-or-other guild foretell about the Oscars? Awards fans must be exhausted by the time the Academy gives out its prize.

But for our purposes, one award show really is worth taking a look at, and may in fact be a harbinger of things to come. The Producers Guild, whose awards were doled out last night, also decided to use the instant runoff system for choosing their Best Picture award shortly after the Motion Picture Academy announced their decision to do the same.

The surprise winner was Hurt Locker, a small-budget film that goes against the usual common wisdom of the Producers Guild awarding habits. As Tom O'Neil at the LA Times puts it:

Some kudos watchers believed that the guild would automatically pick "The Dark Knight" as best picture last year because producers care a lot about their films' succeeding financially. "The Dark Knight" was not only the top-earning movie of 2008 ($531 million in the U.S., $997 million worldwide) but the second-biggest-grossing pic of all time, surpassed only by "Titanic" ($1.8 billion worldwide in 1997).

But "Slumdog Millionaire" was a fantastic financial success in other ways. Produced for only $14 million, it went on to gross $377 million worldwide. Not so "The Hurt Locker," which was produced for $11 million and sold only $16-million worth of tickets at the box office.

The best explanation for this upset, then, is that a majority of Guild members thought it was really good, and there existed a consensus among the members that inspired enough of them to rank it highly enough for it to pass big monster films like Avatar, which may have had a good number of first-choice votes, and might have won using a different system, but not enough folks ranking it highly for it to survive the instant runoffs. This is essentially Steve Pond's take as well (who was surprised to learn that the PGA even used IRV).

Since the Oscars will also use IRV, it stands to reason that usually-predictive power of the Producers Guild may continue to hold true. If there's a soft spot in the majority of Academy members' hearts for Hurt, then what might be a rabid minority for Avatar or Inglorious Basterds may leave disappointed.