Discussing Specific Changes to the Hugo Nomination Election: Another Guest Post By Bruce Schneier
- It should be fair.
- It should be perceived as fair.
- It should be relatively easy to explain, both to the voters and at the WSFS business meeting.
- It should be relatively easy to administer.
- It should encourage people to nominate.
- It shouldn't result in too many nominees for the electorate to reasonably read and rank by the Worldcon.
- It should be resilient to some degree against strategic voting: i.e., minority voting blocs.
In the earlier thread, we identified several different ways to change the voting system. I am going to number them, so we can more easily discuss and compare their properties and suitability.
Option 1: Change the number of candidates a person can nominate. Right now, that number is 5. It can be made less -- or more -- than 5. Call this parameter x.
Option 2: Change the number of winners of the nomination election. Right now that number is 5, with the possibility of more in the case of a tie. We can make this larger (or smaller, I suppose). We can either fix this number at a single value, or make it variable based on various characteristics of the votes (several ways of doing this is are here, here, here, and here). Call this parameter z.
Option 3: Change the mechanism by which the winners are selected. Right now it is a simple first-past-the-post system, in which the nominees that get the most votes win. There are other ways to choose a winner, some more resilient to bloc voting than others. Here, we have several possibilities:
Option 3a: A Satisfaction Approval Voting (SAV) system (see here, here, and here). In this system, the "satisfaction" of each voter with each possible set of winners is computed based on how many of their nominations win). The winners are chosen to maximize the total satisfaction of all voters. SAV computes each voter's satisfaction as the fraction of their nominees who are elected.
Option 3b: A Proportional Approval Voting (PAV) system (see here). This system is like SAV, except each voter's satisfaction is computed with the first nominee elected giving +1 satisfaction, the second nominee +1/2, the third nominee +1/3, and so on - so a voter who had three of their nominees chosen would have a satisfaction of 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 = 1 5/6.
Option 3c: A Reweighted Approval Voting (RAV) -- also called Sequential Proportional Approval Voting -- system (see here, here, here, and here). This system first nominates the candidate with the most votes. Then, all ballots featuring that candidate are "reweighted" so that votes on them are worth proportionally less. The votes are tallied again with the new weights, and then this process is repeated until all nominees are selected. Multiple values of weights has been proposed; these include (Option 3c-1) d'Hondt (1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, ...), (Option 3c-2) Saint-Lague (1, 1/3, 1/5, 1/7, ...), and (Option 3c-3) exponential (1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16...) as the weights for ballots with 0, 1, 2, 3, ... candidates already nominated.
Option 3d: A Single Transferable Vote (STV) system (see here and here, and a simplified version here) probably without -- but possibly with -- ranking. (Illustration with ranking here.) Votes are "divvied up" among the candidates, according to what the ballots say. Candidates are nominated one by one, based on which one has the most votes. Each time a candidate gets nominated, it "uses up" a certain number of votes, which is taken proportionally from the votes it currently holds. If a voter has elected a pre-determined number of candidates, it is discarded. (Call this parameter y.) If no candidate has enough votes, the one with fewest votes is eliminated. Remaining votes are redistributed after each election or elimination. Variants: with or without ranking; and with or without transfers of "extra" votes.
Option 4: Banning Slates. We create a rule outlawing slates. We'd have to figure out how to define a slate, and how to enforce the rule, but it could be done.
Option 5: Making the Voting Tallies Public Throughout the Process. The voting administrator makes public the current state of the vote throughout the nominating process.
These are not mutually exclusive, of course, although we can choose only one Option 3.
Other systems people have mentioned are Cumulative Voting, Single Divisible Vote, Random Ballot, Condorcet Proportional Representation, anti-votes, and several different ways of adding a third voting/approval round. These have not garnered very much support (for good reasons, I think), and I don't think these are worth further consideration.
Again, there are many important issues relating to Hugo voting that are not part of this discussion, but should be discussed elsewhere, including: 1) whether to do something at all, 2) whether to change the electorate, either by making voting easier, making it harder, or turning either the electorate into some sort of preselected jury, 3) changing the voting mechanism of the final election in addition to the nominating election. This discussion assumes that whoever decides these things wants something to be done about the nomination system. We're here to figure out what should be done in that case.
(Thank you to Cheradenine and Jameson Quinn for helping with this summary post.)