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

[mrouse1 at mrouse.com]

Thanks, I was thinking something similar, though you stated it much 
better (grin).

I have been reading through the thread there (826 comments) and it looks 
like others are suggesting Approval voting as well, though I'm not sure 
if that suggestion was taken into account in the final draft. I might 
have to write them and ask. :)
Mike

On 2015-08-24 04:06, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> 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.