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

[mrouse1 at mrouse.com]

As an addendum, they are calling this method “single divisible vote with 
least popular elimination," which I haven't heard of before.

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.
> 
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list 
> info