Hugo Voting Proposal Status Update

By Jameson Quinn: Since the last thread (“To Say Nothing of the Dogs”), there hasn’t been a whole lot of progress in Hugo voting proposals, but it’s still clearly time for an update on various fronts.

To summarize the (tentative) consensus plan developed in the last thread:

  • Ratify EPH this year.
  • Make the following two proposals this year, hopefully to pass and ratify at least one of them.
    • 3SV
      • This means a second round of voting in which the “longlist” of the top 15 from the first round is publicized, and clearly-unworthy works from that list are eliminated if they have enough votes against. It is not intended to deal with mere matters of taste, but merely to insulate against offensive works promoted by slate voters.
      • The text of this proposal is being worked on by a group of (what I’d respectfully characterize as) SMOFs led by Colin Harris. They are behind schedule for various reasons but still plan to reach the finish line.
    • EPH+
      • This means using the Sainte-Laguë divisors with EPH; that is, SDV-LPE-SL, as explained in my paper with Bruce Schneier. To put it in more understandable terms: it’s like EPH, but is slightly harder on works with above-average overlap with other winning works, so that a slate or slates like last years’ puppies could probably average under 3 nominations per category.
      • The text of this proposal is included below.
  • Next year, make one or more of the following two proposals:
    • +2 (or +1) against trolls
      • This is meant to go along with 3SV. It would mean that each voter in the second round could add 2 (or 1) nominations per category for works on the longlist. These nominations would be treated the same as first-round nominations.
      • This would help people make sure that their ballot would have at least one nomination with a viable chance of becoming a finalist, without requiring them to run out and read a full longlist in each category. By doing so, it would help reduce the “long tail” issue, and thus increase the power of non-slate voters. Since slate voters can already ensure they have nominated works on the longlist, their voting power would be largely unaffected.
    • Extend finalists (if it appears necessary)
      • This is also meant to go along with 3SV. It would mean that the elimination ballot would have three options; not just “eliminate” or “keep”, but also “keep but extend”. If a work with a quota of “keep but extend” votes became a finalist, then the number of finalists would be increased by one in that category. This would ensure that slate voters could not push things off the ballot using nominations for things that have non-slate support (such as the puppy support for Sandman: Overture this year).

So, if this is the plan, what still remains to be done in this thread?

  • Discuss whether this plan should be modified (I think not, but I’m open to counterarguments).
  • Settle on a wording for EPH+, find co-signers, and submit the proposal. Current draft is below.
  • Make sure the Colin Harris/ Kevin Standlee group submits their 3SV proposal. For now, I trust that they’re on the job, but if they continue not to have a proposal, I’ll shift that trust to the community to get them back on track.
  • If people want me to be there at WorldCon, then my fundraiser has to be successful. I am very grateful to the people who have so far helped me raise just over $700, but in order to actually go, I’d need $1400. And honestly, I’m hoping to raise even more than that; any excess goes to the Center for Election Science (electology.org), which works to bring well-designed, more-democratic voting systems to contexts beyond just the Hugos. (The consequences of poorly-designed intraparty democracy are on full display these days in both the US and UK. And speaking as someone who lived in Guatemala for 10 years, many other countries would be happy to have as much intraparty democracy as those two.) All donations are tax-deductible in the US.
  • Talk about voting systems and/or electoral pathologies in SF stories. For instance: in Too Like the Lightning, (minor spoilers to end of paragraph) one plot point is an asset voting system, that is, one in which voters can vote for any other valid voter, and each person who gets votes exercises power proportional to the number of votes they hold. This is an excellent voting system, and I’d be happy to discuss how it works / doesn’t work with the rest of the plot.

Here’s the proposed wording of EPH+:

(1) Calculation Phase: First, the total number of nominations (the number of ballots on which each nominee appears) from all eligible ballots shall be tallied for each remaining nominee. Next, a single “point” shall be assigned to each nomination ballot. That point shall be divided equally among all remaining nominees on that ballot. each nomination ballot shall give a point or fraction thereof to each remaining nominee on that ballot, according to the number of such remaining nominees, using the following pattern: 1 point for 1 remaining nominee, 1/3 of a point each for 2 remaining nominees, 1/5 of a point each for 3 remaining nominees, 1/7 of a point each for 4 remaining nominees, and 1/9 of a point each for 5 remaining nominees (extending this pattern as needed if a ballot legally has more remaining nominees). Finally, all points from all nomination ballots shall be totaled for each nominee in that category. These two numbers, point total and number of nominations, shall be used in the Selection and Elimination Phases.

Co-signers (all Rot13): Wnzrfba Dhvaa, Pynhqvn Ornpu, Obaavr Jnesbeq, Pngurevar Snore, Naqerj Uvpxrl, Ebtref Pnqraurnq, Qnivq Tbyqsneo, Yrr Rttre, Gnfun Gheare Yraaubss, Fgrira Unygre, Qnivq Jnyynpr.

65 thoughts on “Hugo Voting Proposal Status Update

  1. Ticky.

    Other examples of interesting voting dynamics in SF:

    – the lizards in So Long and Thanks for All The Fish. Basically a commentary on voting system pathologies.

    – Franchise, by Isaac Asimov. As a statistician, I have to say that this one is pretty silly.

    … there are surely many more; suggestions?

  2. Jameson, don’t forget to send the final wording of EPH+ (with names of its supporters) to [email protected]. Also include any explanatory text. The deadline is August 3.

  3. @Linda: Thanks, I will.

    Unless I reach my fundraising goal, I’ll have to strike my own name from the signers :(. Will it still be OK if I send it, so long as it has other valid members as signers?

  4. I know I’m probably being unnecessarily pedantic (in fandom? say not so!), but unless I’m mis-reading (and have been consistently mis-reading for a while), most of these don’t change the voting system – they change how things make the ballot (the nomination system), which is the broken part.

  5. Eric Franklin: Yes, you scored 30150 in the unnecessarily pedantic quiz.

    Your observation is true, up to a point. The rules proposal changes how the votes are tallied, not how they are cast. But I think everyone understands “voting” is often used to encompass the entire selection process.

  6. @Jameson Quinn: Not SF but fantasy, but there’s an entertaining subplot in David Edding’s The Elenium series which involves the jockeying for votes for the equivalent of the Pope, where calculations of proportions needed to reach certain percentages and thwart the bad guy is enjoyably tense at times (even if Eddings then cheats outrageously once he’s resolved the basic issue.)

  7. Jamison, as I understand it you can still sign it even if you won’t be there. (I hope so; I’ve signed it and I can’t be there….)

    Regarding voting systems, it was in one Heinlein novel (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I think, but it could have been somewhere else) where legislators had (or were proposed to have; not sure if the system was implemented) exactly the proportion of votes as they received in the election. Alice gets 400 votes, Bob gets 500 votes, Charlotte gets 1000 votes, and Dick gets 100 votes, out of an electorate of 2000…. and Alice has 20% of a vote, Bob has 25%, Charlotte has 50% and Dick has 5%. Not sure how that would work in real life, mind you. It strikes me as a sort of Parliamentary system, but I freely admit that as a benighted colonist I don’t have a very good understanding of how Parliamentary systems actually work. (I know they build coalitions….)

  8. Jameson Quinn on July 13, 2016 at 3:22 pm said:

    Unless I reach my fundraising goal, I’ll have to strike my own name from the signers…

    You only have to be a member of the Worldcon in question (including a supporting member) to sponsor proposals. You don’t have to attend.

    Of course, if you aren’t any sort of member of the 2016 Worldcon, you can’t co-sponsor proposals presented to it.

  9. If I miss the fundraising goal, then I won’t buy a membership. (So once again, thanks to all who have donated, I’m over halfway there, and any help is appreciated and tax deductible.)

    @Cassy: The system you describe from Heinlein is a form of asset voting, similar to the one I mentioned from Too Like the Lightning. As I said, it’s a good system; simple, yet likely to settle on any Condorcet winner that exists, even in the presence of strategy. (It only fails to do so if several ingredients are present, including some voters indifferent between some options, a deadline, and a willingness to engage in extreme brinksmanship for slight advantages.)

    In fact, I believe that a system based on asset voting would be a good solution for the UK labour party’s current impasse. The idea is that Labour votes in the parliamentary election would count as implicit proxies to the given MP, unless explicitly given through membership. But implicit votes would be downweighted, to the fraction of voters in that constituency who voted explicitly. So if a given constituency had 30,000 Labour voters, of whom 5,000 were dues-paying members who explicitly gave their proxy to someone (probably someone other than the local MP), then that MP would get a voting weight of 25,000 * (5,000/30,000) or just a bit less than the 5,000 explicit votes. The result is that the parliamentary party would have an explicit vote in the leadership election, but with a voting power slightly less than that of the dues-paying members; and that popular MPs would have more power.

    @David: Medieval election systems for things like the Pope or the Doge of Venice were often actually better-designed than modern ones. Both of those systems included aspects of approval voting; that is, the ability to vote for more than one candidate on the same balloting, which helps prevent vote-splitting and makes for an altogether better system. Is the Eddings election like that?

  10. Why not have a SJW SMOF star chamber to decide which books make the list of finals?

    Or what about having three rounds of voting. One “regular” nomination round. Next, only World Con attendees can vote on which nominations are “pure.” Then World Con the following year attendees actually vote on the two previous rounds of voting.

  11. Observing a Freakout, frankly, those changes are both too radical to ever pass two consecutive Worldcon Business Meetings. Especially the star chamber suggestion. The Hugos have never been a juried award and there would be a massive resistance to making them into one.

  12. @Observing A Freakout

    A juried award is really not the Hugo’s style; indeed, there’s been a lot of opposition to even unofficial ballot-box stuffing campaigns. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

  13. The longer this goes on the more and more convoluted the proposed nominating procedure becomes. Whatever does get passed should have a yearly sunset vote, and also a requirement that it be shown to actually, you know, be effective.

  14. @Jameson: Sadly, the Eddings system isn’t as sophisticated as that; it mostly revolves around the percentage of those present and voting, so there are shenanigans relating to voters arriving, leaving and being nobbled.

  15. Fundraising is now up to $850; here’s an ASCII (well, unicode) thermometer

    (*****************ººººººººººº)

    Thanks again to all the donors!

    @Rick:

    The longer this goes on the more and more convoluted the proposed nominating procedure becomes.

    It’s a fair criticism. Ideally, a voting system should be simple enough to fully grasp the first time you hear about it. That’s why approval voting is one of the best reforms for political elections: it’s dead simple but still remarkably robust.

    But the Hugo awards are a fundamentally tough problem. There’s no way for every voter to read every work, so a nomination round to narrow the field is unavoidable. And once you have a two-round system and a group of voters explicitly dedicated to finding and exploiting loopholes, you have to sacrifice at least one of the three desirables: robustness, ease of voting, and simplicity of description. EPH+ is based on sacrificing the last of the three.

    Once you give that up, how can you know that the system actually is robust? Well, you have two choices: you can either become a voting geek, or find one whom you trust. (I suppose you could also do both.) That’s why I think it’s important for me to be there at Worldcon. I had fun last year and would again this year, but honestly I wouldn’t be considering going if it were just about me. So yes, I appreciate all donations for my own sake, but if you give, you’re really doing it for fandom, not for me.

    Whatever does get passed should have a yearly sunset vote,

    I have no objections to a yearly re-confirmation vote. But I do think it’s unwise to be able to permanently sunset a system in just one year, given that it would take two years to put it back. So if you want a sunset clause, the first “no” vote should only cover the following year; the system shouldn’t die until it gets voted down (at least) two years in a row.

    and also a requirement that it be shown to actually, you know, be effective.

    That’s exactly what my paper with Bruce Schneier does. It shows that if we’d had EPH last year, there would have been non-puppy options in all of the categories, so presumably no need for “no award”. And if we’d had EPH+, there would have been an average of at least two non-puppy options per category, even considering only the categories the puppies focused on.

  16. To keep the “fictional elections” discussion going: Jon Snow’s election to be Lord Commander has some interesting aspects. In the books, it’s got repeated runoffs until he reaches an absolute majority; probably copied from modern papal elections, this is a good safeguard for an election system, if you can afford the time. In the show, the electorate is much smaller (in my view, far too small to plausibly defend the Wall, even in the show’s smaller Westeros), and they can’t spare the time for multiple rounds of voting, but they do have a neat stacking gizmo for counting the votes. If they’d only hired me, though, I could have designed them a stacking gizmo for approval voting, or at least for IRV.

  17. “I am the token in the darkness. I am the counter at the wall. I am the tally that sums against the cold, the lot that brings the dawn, the pseudo-steampunk counting gizmo that wakes the sleepers, the chip that guards the realms of men.”

  18. Cathy Palmer-Lister: Oh, I think I just figured out shy people make “ticky” comments. You can’t get updates on comments unless you comment?

    That’s the way the ::ticky:: tumbles…

  19. Having had more time to think about it, I’m wondering why we can’t accept Hugo Nominations all year long. That is, start in February of Year Y to accept nominations for works published in year Y. This would be an online form where anyone could propose new works and/or vote for existing ones. No limit; propose all you like, and vote for all you like.

    Then in February of year Y+1, you take the top 15 (or maybe up to 25) nominations per category(using EPH+) and call that the “semifinal list.” Members would pick up to five from that list, and we’d use EPH+ to generate a top-5 list of Hugo Finalists. The final vote would be as usual.

    With a whole year to nominate, people would be able to nominate things right when they read them. You’d also have crowd-sourcing to find duplicates. Unlimited nominations wouldn’t help the slates much, but it would generate more overlap between organic votes. It would be really hard for a slate to prevent organic candidates from getting at least 5 slots out of 15 to 25 semifinalists.

    The vote to pick finalists would be much easier for people, since it would only involve picking five from a list, rather than typing anything in. This would concentrate organic votes enough to make it harder for slates to dominate.

    The obvious problem I see is that someone would have to maintain the semifinalist nomination system all year long–presumably passing it from one WorldCon to the next one every February. But it seems easier for people to understand and harder to screw up.

  20. @Mike Glyer

    “Now My Scroll Begins” is another nice one. Or maybe both together, if that’s too obscure. “Now My Scroll Begins. I Am the Pixel in the Darkness.”

  21. “Now My Scroll Begins” is another nice one.

    Great, now I’m thinking “When Will My Scroll Begin.” I wonder how long that is going to be stuck in my head?

  22. Greg: I like your idea, but wonder if it would encourage log-rolling. SFWA used to do a similar system with the Nebulas, where members could see the votes each work had up until the nomination deadline. I seem to remember that encouraged a lot of gaming of the system, since authors could see how close their works were to making or not making the final ballot.

    What if instead the Hugos had an online recommended reading list, similar to what SFWA now offers for the Nebulas? I really like this system since it encourages people to make story recommendations but takes away the incentive to log-roll the votes since these are merely recommendations, not nomination votes.

  23. The obvious problem I see is that someone would have to maintain the semifinalist nomination system all year long–presumably passing it from one WorldCon to the next one every February. But it seems easier for people to understand and harder to screw up.

    Since nearly every other proposal currently being discussed totally ignores the impact of the changes on the Hugo Administrators who actually do all the work, why bother to starting thinking about that now?

  24. @John Lorentz: That’s not fair at all. The 3SV proposal is being written by future Hugo administrators; and EPH+ is identical to EPH in terms of workload. As for +2AT and/or EF (see post for definitions), they would be some extra work, but only a tiny fraction of the total. And anyway, I see nobody suggesting making either of those latter two proposals this year.

    Separately: Fundraising now up to $950. Thank you so much! I think there’s a good chance we’ll actually make it! (I had begun to lose hope after it got stuck at $700 for so long).

    This brings up a few issues.

    – Speaking on a purely selfish level, I’d rather raise, say, $1200 for electology.org but not be able to go to Worldcon, than raise $0 and get to go. I mean, I have no doubt I would enjoy it, and I absolutely understand that people are donating in the hope that I will be able to be there, so I’m going to keep pushing all the way to reaching the goal. But what I’m saying here is that I’ve done a bunch of work on this, and I hope that I can raise some money for a cause I consider worthy in the process, so I’m not going to stop asking for donations once I reach the base amount.

    – If somebody can donate an attending membership, that would be worth its list price to me, and I’d count that towards the goal.

  25. @Jason Sanford

    Greg: I like your idea, but wonder if it would encourage log-rolling. SFWA used to do a similar system with the Nebulas, where members could see the votes each work had up until the nomination deadline. I seem to remember that encouraged a lot of gaming of the system, since authors could see how close their works were to making or not making the final ballot.

    I didn’t mean to suggest showing the running vote totals until after the nominations closed. So you could think of the thing as a big reading list, if you wanted to.

  26. @Jameson Quinn

    – Speaking on a purely selfish level, I’d rather raise, say, $1200 for electology.org but not be able to go to Worldcon, than raise $0 and get to go.

    Just to clarify, you aren’t planning to do that, right? You’re just stating what’s more important to you. But you’re not really considering changing the goal of your fundraiser after already collecting almost $1,000, right? I say this not because I misunderstood you (I’m pretty clear on what you’re saying, I think: if you raise the money you will go. There is zero chance you’ll skip the con and divert the money) but because others might, and then not be motivated to donate.

  27. @John Lorentz

    Since nearly every other proposal currently being discussed totally ignores the impact of the changes on the Hugo Administrators who actually do all the work, why bother to starting thinking about that now?

    So is it a big deal to nurse the voting program? Especially if you get lots of free labor to help find duplicates?

  28. That’s not fair at all. The 3SV proposal is being written by future Hugo administrators; and EPH+ is identical to EPH in terms of workload. As for +2AT and/or EF (see post for definitions), they would be some extra work, but only a tiny fraction of the total. And anyway, I see nobody suggesting making either of those latter two proposals this year.

    It’s entirely fair.

    As a four-time former Hugo Administrator (including Sasquan), I have an intimate knowledge of how work much it currently takes to handle the Hugos, and I also know how much more work EPH is going to add. The other methods will only add additional needed work, to be performed within a very limited amount of available time to complete that work.

    The results may or may not give better results, but the issue I’ve had with the proposals is what appears to be a view that Hugo administrator work hours and calendar days are unlimited. However, when I expressed those views at the Business Meeting last year, online comments to live feeds of the meeting were that I was lying and I obviously had never actually been a Hugo administrator because I had no idea what I was talking about.

    Since I have no desire to be a target of both a group of right-wing wackos and the folks who are trying to fix the award process without acknowledging the additional work their fixes will bring in, I’ll likely skip the Business Meeting this year.

  29. Observing a Freakout: I think one problem might be that if the vote were left till the following year, it would damage the effect of the award as a recommendation, which relies on its coming quite early in a work’s lifecycle.

    Regarding the idea of a jury: I totally agree that this would not be in the spirit of the Hugos, but I actually think it would be wrong to call it a juried award just because the finalists were selected by a jury: in my view it’s still a popular choice award if the winner is chosen by a popular vote. I actually think that the pattern of open nominations (i.e. proposals), juried selection, and open voting would make a lot of sense (the idea being that the jury would not just be expressing their own preferences, but trying to find the works that had the broadest support); the Dragons seem to be doing something along these lines, though they are a bit cryptic about it, and it will probably save them a lot of headaches. It wouldn’t be a Hugo, though.

  30. On another issue: has EPH+ been tested against existing Hugo results, as EPH was tested against those for 1983 (and I believe also those for 2014, though I don’t think the results of that were made public)?

  31. To be clear: if I hit the goal, I will absolutely go to the con. If I miss the goal by a small amount, and I can figure out a way to make the budget work, I will try to go, but I am not promising. And I will do what I can to continue to fundraise whether or not I have reached the goal. I’m sorry if I gave any impression otherwise.

  32. @John Lorentz: I’m sorry you feel that way.

    I’m not entirely sure what you’re advocating here. Are you saying we shouldn’t pass EPH because it’s too much work? Or that EPH is OK but somehow EPH+ wouldn’t be? Or would you like contact info for the group working on 3SV so you can share your concerns with them?

  33. EPH+ has been tested against last year’s results, just as EPH has; that’s in the paper I’ve linked to several times now.

  34. Yes, but testing against last year’s results is addressed to a different question: it shows how effective the system is in dealing with slates, but not whether it would seriously change results in ordinary, non-slate circumstances. EPH was tested to show that (under reasonable assumptions) it would not; do we know that about EPH+?

  35. I’m not entirely sure what you’re advocating here. Are you saying we shouldn’t pass EPH because it’s too much work?

    I already expressed my views at the Sasquan Business Meeting, when I argued against EPH because of the amount of additional work that the change forces upon the Hugo Administrators, a job that is (for several reasons) already extremely difficult–much more than it used to be. (I have been an administrator in 1998, 2002, 2006 and 2015, so I have seen the steady progression in complexity of the job.)

    Or would you like contact info for the group working on 3SV so you can share your concerns with them?

    I have already expressed my views to 3SV committee members. My concerns have been viewed to be not relevant.

  36. Andrew M:

    Yes, it was tested and yes, there was one change in nominations if I remember correctly.

  37. Thanks. That is the same as with EPH, if I remember rightly; so that does seem to establish that it doesn’t distort the outcome significantly.

  38. @John Lorentz

    I already expressed my views at the Sasquan Business Meeting, when I argued against EPH because of the amount of additional work that the change forces upon the Hugo Administrators, a job that is (for several reasons) already

    You probably don’t remember me, but I did come up to you after the business meeting at Sasquan to ask you what the big extra effort was, and, if I recall correctly, it was that EPH would make the deduplication effort more important to get right, and that that was already a huge effort. I did have you in mind when I made my comment above about how an open, year-long process might help the admins by crowdsourcing most of the deduplication problem.

  39. If I understand the matter rightly, ‘deduplication’ can refer to two different things:
    a. Checking whether two names do, or don’t, in fact refer to the same work.
    b. Supposing they do, physically changing the ballots to ensure that the same name appears on all of them, as is necessary if they are to be processed electronically.

    I also understand that it is the second which EPH makes more problematic.

    Crowdsourcing would help with the first the first, but not, as far as I can see, with the second. On the other hand, having a whole year to do it in would presumably make things easier. ‘Ah, two more nominations for Seveneyes; I’d better correct them.’

  40. Both Andrew and Greg have hit upon the point where EPH mainly causes extra work for the admins.

    Currently, five items (usually) per category get on the ballot. So, while the administrators must identify and fix items for each category (free-form text input is just oodles of fun to deal with!), they know that they really only need to deal with fixing the items that are close to the top five slots.

    With EPH, a far larger number of items have to be corrected because that process may eliminate several of the top five entries. Computer processing doesn’t make it easier–any automated system for counting needs the items to match exactly for them to be counted together. So the time and effort needed to get the final ballot ramps up quickly.

    Some categories (like Fan Writer), it’s easy. Others, not so much. (I was amazed just how many different ways fans can enter the names of short-form dramatic presentations–I think Game of Thrones: “The Mountain and The Viper” was entered about ten different ways.)

    It’s possible keeping the nominations open for a full year might help–I’ve always been a proponent of opening balloting as early as possible. But fans have a tendency to procrastinate. You can opening nominations for the 2017 Hugos on January 1st, 2016 and still 75% of the ballots won’t come in until the last 10 days. And now that people are allowed to change their ballots until the last minutes, you still won’t get all the actual nominations until voting closes. (I do miss the days of paper ballots, for this reason alone.)

  41. @John Lorentz

    I understand your concerns with the workload changes with the proposed voting systems (and I very much appreciate the work of you and all the other volunteers that make the Hugo’s happen!). Given your experience, what would your preferred solution to the slate voting problem be?

  42. @John Lorentz I do think the problem would be a bit simpler if the free-input forms featured auto-complete. Then as soon as people entered “Game of” they’d most likely see “The Mountain and the Viper” in the drop down and just click on that. Even if the dropdown showed three different ways to write it (because it hadn’t been deduplicated yet) then at least most people would still be picking one of three.

    The way to handle written ballots is just for an admin to type them in when they arrive and then treat them exactly the same as electronic ones thereafter. That means we can treat all ballots as electronic for most purposes.

    Although it’s true that most fans will put it off, all that’s really required is that there be some fans who don’t. As long as the number of people inputting entirely new entries (rather than picking from the drop-down) is small, it’ll be okay if there’s a big surge of input in the last ten days. In other words, the problem only arises when people are submitting works that weren’t in the database already. (I’d probably want to include an option to submit works without voting on them. That way people could submit the entire contents of magazines as soon as they came out. It’d also be possible to tag things as “known to be ineligible.” They’d still appear in the drop down, but would instantly generate a warning.)

    For the record, I’m a retired software professional, I have lots of experience working with inexact text matches, and I’d happily volunteer to write this software for free, if the committee asked me to do so.

  43. Greg Hullender said:

    I do think the problem would be a bit simpler if the free-input forms featured auto-complete. Then as soon as people entered “Game of” they’d most likely see “The Mountain and the Viper” in the drop down and just click on that. Even if the dropdown showed three different ways to write it (because it hadn’t been deduplicated yet) then at least most people would still be picking one of three.

    Would that not constitute peeking at other people’s supposed-to-be-secret ballots?

    (Yes, you don’t know who entered those spellings, and you probably don’t get the full number of people who voted for it, but this is supposed to be a process with zero involuntary information leakage.)

  44. @Petréa Mitchell

    Would that not constitute peeking at other people’s supposed-to-be-secret ballots?

    As long as people understood the process, I don’t think there would be much objection to it, as long as there are no names or numbers attached to it. No actual secret is being divulged, nor is there any way to mine the data for those secrets. Especially if you include the option to add nominees without voting, in which case magazines could just routinely add all of their stories every month, so the list would look more like a list of everything published that year.

  45. I do think the problem would be a bit simpler if the free-input forms featured auto-complete. Then as soon as people entered “Game of” they’d most likely see “The Mountain and the Viper” in the drop down and just click on that. Even if the dropdown showed three different ways to write it (because it hadn’t been deduplicated yet) then at least most people would still be picking one of three.

    Theoretically, that would be a good way to handle it and would help speed up the process tremendously. (I say “theoretically”, because I’m not the person who has written the software that has been used to capture votes–I was just the end-user.) (I’m not really a web processes guy–I work more on legacy mainframes.)

    The way to handle written ballots is just for an admin to type them in when they arrive and then treat them exactly the same as electronic ones thereafter. That means we can treat all ballots as electronic for most purposes.

    You misunderstand me. (That is exactly the way we handle paper ballots now.)

    I was missing the day when people voted by paper, forcing them to vote exactly once, without the option of changing their votes later. That way the admins knew that the ballots they received were countable, and could get some work done ahead of the deadline. Now the admins have to wait, and then jump directly into rush mode. (Yes, I know we’ll never go back to that process–too many people like not having to make their minds up until the last minute. I was just feeling nostalgic.)

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