[EM] New Hugo (Science Fiction Award) voting method

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 08/24/2015 02:27 AM, Michael Rouse wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure how many people here are fans of science fiction, but there
> was a big brouhaha at this years awards (which I'll ignore), and one of
> the results was the proposal of a new method of choosing winners:
> 
> *Short Title: E Pluribus Hugo (Out of the Many, a Hugo)*
> Moved, to amend section 3.8 (Tallying of Nominations), section 3.9
> (Notification and Acceptance), and section 3.11 (Tallying of Votes) as
> follows:

[snip]

So this is basically cumulative voting IRV? I suppose it's better than
ordinary IRV, but if they're using an Approval ballot, why not just use
Approval to begin with?

Do they want a proportional representation method or a majoritarian one?
The reference to avoiding slates seem to suggest to me that they want a
proportional representation method, or at least something that is closer
to a PR method.

As a positional elimination method, it could suffer path dependence.
Consider someone nominating (voting for) X, Y, and Z. Say now that Y is
very narrowly eliminated at some point, but if the person had voted for
X and Y alone, he would have given enough of his vote to Y to have kept
Y from being eliminated. So the claim that "[i]n other words, you can
safely nominate anything you feel is Hugo-worthy" doesn't seem to be
strictly true. You can safely nominate anything that is relatively
unpopular, but if it gets popular enough, it may draw enough support
away from the others you would also like to nominate.

If I were to construct a majoritarian ballot system with Approval
ballots, I would just use Approval. There's a similar "drawing away from
other popular candidates" problem (the chicken/Burr thing), but Approval
is much simpler and doesn't repeated iteration.

For PR, the question is much harder. With computers, you could use PAV,
sequential PAV or birational voting. However, the non-sequential ones
require a lot of recounts and are probably not feasible for manual
elections. Sequential ones are simpler but the proportionality might not
be obvious.