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

[Jameson Quinn]

Yes, I was the designer of this system, and I was there at Worldcon to get
it passed.

What was needed was a proportional system based on approval ballots. There
are of course a number of options in this vein. Within these limitations,
this system was designed for:

-Relative simplicity of explanation. I found that explaining STV-like
systems which are top-down and so require keeping track of how "used up" a
ballot is were too hard to explain.
-Resistance to "bullet voting" strategy, since widespread use of such
strategy would weaken the non-slate voters against slate voters.

It is like IRV in that it is a bottom-up elimination system. However, it
was in no way "based on" IRV, and in fact it differs in one key regard: it
looks at the whole of each ballot from step one, instead of ignoring all
but one of the choices on each ballot at any given time.

I'd be happy to answer any further questions about it here.

Jameson

2015-08-24 13:22 GMT-04:00 <mrouse1 at mrouse.com>:

> That would be awesome -- there are too many emails over there to read in
> one sitting! :)
> Mike
>
>
> On 2015-08-24 10:49, Andy Jennings wrote:
>
>> Jameson Quinn, who's on this list, was working with the Hugo awards to
>> come up with this system.
>>
>> I believe he proposed simple systems first, but several wrinkles came
>> up which necessitated the complexity.
>>
>> I'll email him and see if I can get him to chime in here.
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 8:29 AM, <mrouse1 at mrouse.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>>
>>
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