Vote Like Brad & Angelina: Rank Best Picture Choices

Please check out a nifty Facebook poll by Opavote where you can rank the Oscar-nominated pictures!

It's Oscar season again. The choice voting system of proportional representation was used to nominate nearly all categories, and now the ranked choice voting "instant runoff" system for one-winner elections is being used to select Best Picture. Both ranked choice systems are preferential voting systems widely used in governmental elections. Choice voting is used by every voter in at least one of their elections in Australia, Ireland, Malta, New Zealand, Northern Ireland and Scotland and in the American cities of Cambridge (MA) and Minneapolis (MN). Instant runoff voting is used to elect mayors in a growing number of American cities, including Portland (ME), St. Paul (MN), Minneapolis (MN), Oakland (CA) and San Francisco (CA).

In the coming weeks, members of Academy of Motion Pictures -- from stars like Brad Pitt an Angelina Jolie to the essential behind-the-camera members who make movies possible -- will rank the nine nominees for Best picture in order of choice. They can ran all nine movies, knowing that ranking a second choice won't hurt their first choice, but might help defeat their last choice.The winner will be the movie that has enough first choices to be at or near the top at the start of the count, and has broad support to pick up second and lower choices from backers of less-supported movies as they are eliminated in the count.

We've written a lot about how the system works in Oscar voting on this blog. To get a chance to weigh in yourself, check out the new Facebook poll by Opavote where you can rank the Oscar-nominated pictures!

OscarVotes123 Voters Accurately Predict Oscar Winner

Congrats OscarVotes123 voters! You accurately predicted that The Artist would win best picture. See this article in the San Francisco Chronicle that talks about how ranked choice voting continually picks good winners for best picture.See the results of the poll here.

Nominations Out Today!

Nominations for the Oscars were released this morning. Check out the full list of nominees, and be sure to vote for your favorites for Best Picture on our site. We use Ranked Choice Voting just like the Academy.

AMPAS Modifies Best Picture Nomination Method, Maintains Proportional Voting Principles

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a long history of using innovative voting methods to nominate and select the winners of its annual Academy Awards. This week it announced changes in the way nominations for the sought-after Best Picture award will be determined and confirmed that it will keep ranked choice voting (RCV, or "instant runoff voting) for the final vote for Best Picture..

The Academy announced Tuesday that, beginning next year, movies will be nominated for Best Picture using a modified form of the choice voting form of proportional voting used for nominations in nearly all other categories. The new rules will always result in at least five nominated movies and as many as ten, but not a fixed number. The Academy has long used choice voting  to select nominees and adopted instant runoff voting  to select the Best Picture winner in 2009.

FairVote confirmed with Academy leader how the new rules will work. Under the new Best Picture nomination system, Academy voters will submit ballots ranking their top 5 movies in order of preference.The job for those voters (likely to be about 5,000 out of a pool of 6,000) is easy: just indicate their preferred movies in order of preference.

Best Picture nominees will be chosen according to the following process -- a more complicated one than traditional choice voting, but still making it likely that the final set of nominees will reflect a full diversity of perspectives among Academy voters.

1. First choice votes are tallied as one vote each.
   
2. The rules for a choice voting election for ten winners then are applied -- meaning that the "victory threshold" is just over 9.1% of the total votes cast. Any picture securing at least 9.1% support at any point in the count is nominated.(Note that this threshold derives from the fact that it is the fewest number of votes that only ten winners can have. When applied to other categories like Best Actor and Best Actress, the threshold is just over one-sixth of the vote, as that is the fewer number of votes that only five winners can have.)
   
3. If any motion picture nominee's total in first choices surpasses 11% of first choice (which is a fifth more than the 9.1% threshold -- typically in choice voting this surplus happens for any ballots beyond the victory threshold, but the Academy adds this extra "cushion"), then that nominee's "surplus" ballots above the winning threshold are distributed to next choices, with every ballot added to the totals of the next choice listed on it at an equally reduced value (with the total of those transferred values equal to the surplus beyond the victory threshold). If the second choice on the ballot has already passed the victory threshold and been nominated, then the ballot is added to the totals of the third choice, and so forth.
   
4. This process is repeated for each nominee that has more than victory threshold.
   
5. At this point, all pictures with less than 1% support are simultaneously eliminated. Any ballots ranking them first (or redistributed from nominated movies) are added to the totals of the next choice on the ballot that has not been nominated.
   
6. Vote totals are examined. Any picture with at least 5% support is a nominee. All other pictures will be eliminated. The number of nominees could be as few as five (in the event that fewer than five movies secure at least 5%, the top vote-getters among movies below 5% will be nominated) or as many as ten (in the unlikely event that more than ten pictures surpass 5%, the ones with the fewest votes above 5% will be eliminated.)

As veteran entertainment journalist Steve Pond details in his highly recommended discussion of the potential impact of the new rules at The Wrap, this process will result in fewer votes actually counting for nominated movies in the final round, but will also increase the value of a movie having enthusiastic support. Very few motion pictures will be nominated that don't have close to 5% of first choices, unlike under the old rules. At the same time, it's also possible that a Best Picture nomination will go to a more iconoclastic movie that has enough strong adherents to secure 5% first choice support, but is not widely enough known or appreciated to have been able to secure 9.1% of the vote under the old rules.

The rule changes will only affect nominations for Best Picture. As in previous years, choice voting will be used to select nominees in nearly all other categories, and ranked choice voting will be used to select the ultimate winner of the Best Picture award. In another notable development, the Academy also indicated that it will soon be shifting to an electronic voting system in lieu of paper ballots, possibly as early as next year.

For FairVote's coverage of last year's Academy Awards nomination and selection process, including an authentic instant runoff voting poll that accurately predicted the Best Picture winner, see earlier posts on this blog. For more information on the election systems used by the Academy, visit:

• Choicevoting.com
• Instantrunoff.com
• FairVote.org's instant runoff voting resources

AMPAS Praises IRV

As regular readers of this blog will know, voters in the United Kingdom will soon cast ballots in a May 5 referendum to decide whether IRV (known locally as the Alternative Vote) will be used for future elections in that country. As the decision date nears, one very familiar organization using IRV has endorsed the system -- the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The Independent reports that AMPAS is happy with the performance of IRV in Best Picture elections and plans to continue using the system. Bruce Davis, Executive Director of AMPAS, voiced the organization’s satisfaction, citing IRV’s support of fair outcomes and boost to voter turnout. Said Davis:

For our most important category we wanted to ensure that more than half the electorate endorsed the choice. We're very happy with the way it's working and we don't plan to change it.

There was a certain trepidation from our members when we first announced it that it might prove more cumbersome. But we explained the system and PricewaterhouseCoopers told us that more members actually voted than before.

Davis went on to point out that skeptics' concerns about the system were overblown:

There were lots of conspiracy theory blogs about how people could rig the voting but they proved fatuous. You want to find the picture that has the broadest support rather than the most passionate support by a minority.

Polls have been close throughout the campaign season, and only time will tell which side of the issue will emerge victorious on Thursday. You can read more on the campaign at the FairVote Blog. But whatever the outcome of the UK referendum, the continued satisfaction of AMPAS with IRV indicates the system’s power to produce fair, widely-supported outcomes -- even in elections as perennially contentious as the Oscars.