Oscars Elections

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Oscar season 2011 is over. At the Academy Awards ceremony last night, The King’s Speech took home the coveted Best Picture award, besting such prominent contenders as The Social Network and Inception. Just like last year, the winner of the award was chosen using the Academy’s “preferential voting” system, otherwise known as instant runoff voting. And once again, the results refute the notion that the preferential voting system tilts the playing field in favor of any certain kind of film.

In the wake of the ceremony, there has been speculation in some quarters that The King’s Speech might have been helped along to victory by the preferential balloting method. But a quick look at results from this year and last shows that this argument stands on shaky factual ground. Just as The Hurt Locker did last year, The King’s Speech won both the Best Picture award and the prize for Best Director. Unlike the Best Picture category, which was expanded to a ten-candidate preferential ballot contest last year, the Best Director category is decided by a more traditional formula: Five nominees are selected, and the winner is chosen by a simple plurality vote. If there were, as skeptics claim, a built-in advantage for certain candidates in the IRV system, then we would expect the Best Director category to produce results different from the Best Picture outcome. But in each of the first two years of preferential balloting, the results have been the same, with the Best Picture winner also taking home the Oscars for Best Director. This would suggest that, far from radically upsetting the traditional system, the introduction of IRV in the Best Picture Category has simply provided a means to protect fair outcomes while expanding the field to ten candidates.

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. Executive Director of AMPAS, voiced the organization’s satisfaction, citing IRV’s support of fair outcomes and boost to voter turnout.

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 Price water house Coopers told us that more members actually voted than before.

He 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.



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