Academy to use preferential voting to pick best picture

Get out the calculator -- Oscar voting just got more complicated.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today took the long expected step to ensure that this year's best picture winner won't be hated by 90% of its members by going with a preferential voting system for members.

In a preferential voting system, votes for the least popular first choice movie are eliminated and those members' second choices are taken into account. The process continues until a nominee receives more than 50% of the votes.

Academy spokesperson Leslie Unger confirmed that the organization will apply the same preferential voting system it uses in the Oscar nomination process to best picture voting starting this winter. The news was first reported by The Wrap.

Such a move has been in the works since the Academy decided in June to expand the number of best picture nominees from five to 10. At the time, Academy Vice President Hawk Koch said that there would be a change in the voting process, stating, "We want to make sure that 11% does not win the best picture."

Under the old system, members simply voted for their first choice. With 10 nominees, that would mean a movie with one vote more than 10% could theoretically be named best picture.

Other categories will continue to utilize the traditional single-vote process to pick winners.

The change marks the first time that the Academy has used preferential voting for best picture since at least 1944, when it reduced the number of nominees from 10 to five.

Update (6:10 PM): Unger clarified that in fact that last time preferential voting was used to select the best picture was in 1945.

--Ben Fritz

Comments

[Alika]

Well, it's about time. Now all we need is to make our real elections run the same way. Seriously, a runoff election for community college boardmember?

[Robert Harper]

In theory, preferential voting has a lot to offer. People generally are unfamiliar with the concept and, perhaps if Lani Guinier hadn't been so unprotected by President Clinton, the concept would be more talked about and practiced.The Academy, for instance, could have spent time informing the public how the process was used in the nomination process and how that was appealing to members - and maybe even useful in communities. I discussed this notion one time with Congressman Conyers - at the Kodak before an Oscar show.
The problem with this current usage - the change to 10, the preferential here, not there - is that a very small group of people decided to make the changes without consulting the membership. You may hear about "the Board" making the call and it sounds official, but 1300 actors are repped by 3 people, while a couple hundred "public relations" members and "executive" members are repped by 6. It's one thing to hire a host or put on dancing during an organization's fund raising dinner, it's quite another to purport to speak for thousands of artists when a tradition of 7 decades is changed without discussion.
PR people - by profession - cloud the truth; artists expose it. Who's calling the shots?

[Bob T.]

With preferential voting, you rank you choices, and the one with the lowest number of 1st preferences, they take the 2nd preference an redistribute them. Here's a couple of examples:

How getting MORE votes can cause you to loose!

Number of votes, 1st Preference, 2nd Preference
39 Star Trek > Harry Potter
35 Harry Potter > Angels and Demons
26 Angels and Demons > Star Trek

In this example, Angels and Demons is eliminated, thus transferring 26 votes to Star Trek:

Number of votes, 1st Preference, 2nd Preference
39 Star Trek > Harry Potter
35 Harry Potter > Angels and Demons
26 Star Trek

39+26 = 65 for Star Trek 35 for Harry Potter. STAR TREK IS THE WINNER.

But let's say, before the voting, a big push was made by the studio and convinced many people who would have voted Harry Potter first, to rank Star Trek 1st, and Harry Potter 2nd. Star Trek gets 10 MORE VOTES, people that would have voted for HP (they rank HP as their second choice). Look at it now:

Number of votes, 1st Preference, 2nd Preference
49 Star Trek > Harry Potter
25 Harry Potter > Angels and Demons
26 Angels and Demons > Star Trek

With preference voting, the movie with the least number of votes is eliminated. Now Harry Potter is eliminated thus transferring 25 votes to Angels and Demons.

Number of votes, 1st Preference, 2nd Preference
49 Star Trek > Harry Potter
25 Angels and Demons
26 Angels and Demons > Star Trek

49 for Star Trek and 25+26=51 for Angels and Demons. ANGELS AND DEMONS IS THE WINNER!????

This is preference voting's anomaly where by voting for your favorite can hurt your favorite. This is well know has will be the subject of a federal lawsuit:

http://www.aspendailynews.com/print/136163

Now another example of how voters preferences don't match the outcome:

First we will agree on one thing:

40% prefer Harry Potter over Star Trek (40% Harry Potter > Star Trek)
60% Star Trek over Harry Potter (60% Star Trek > Harry Potter)

Now let's add a third movie, but we will keep the above the same (pairwise)

Rank
1 , 2 , 3
40% Harry Potter > Angels & Demons > Star Trek
35% Angels & Demons > Star Trek > Harry Potter
25% Star Trek > Harry Potter > Angels & Demons

You can see that 40% still prefer Harry Potter over Star Trek, and 60% (35% + 25%) prefer Star Trek over Harry Potter.

Let's run this through preference voting.
In preference voting., the movie with the lowest votes gets eliminated and the voters second choice gets distributed.
Star Trek has the lowest votes, so it is eliminated, thus transferring 25 votes to Harry Potter.
Giving us:

Harry Potter 40 + 25(transferred) = 65
Angels and Demons = 35

Harry Potter WINS!? Even though 60% preferred Star Trek over Harry Potter.

These problems do not always happen, but I think we can all agree that an election system that you NEVER KNOW if you are helping or hurting your choice by voting for them is not a fair system. A vote should ALWAYS elevate that choice to a higher chance of winning.

Preference Voting fails that test.

[Alika]

@ Bob T.

In your last example, had it not been plurality voting, then Harry Potter still would have won the Academy vote with a 40% plurality win. Same end result as the IRV election.