by Bright Ewuru | May 7, 2025 | Articles
Recognition isn’t always black and white. Often, it’s necessary to capture the full breadth and depth of your judges’ opinions while recognising the most broadly supported candidates. And in so doing, your method of evaluating awards entries matters.
Is your current judging method helping you fairly identify top candidates, or could it be working against you? Let’s discuss how a ranked-choice voting system, and more specifically, single transferable voting (STV) can help you celebrate different degrees of excellence and preference.
Ranked-choice voting is a system in which voters rank candidates in order of preference instead of choosing just one. Its popularity has soared, not only in political contexts, but in the creative awards scene as well. The Oscars use ranked-choice voting to determine the winner of its most prestigious award, the Best Picture.
Single transferable voting is a specific version of ranked-choice voting. As a proportional voting method, the STV system allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference, but to elect multiple winners. The STV calculation is used for elections across much of the English-speaking world.
The STV calculation requires that a candidate needs a to meet a quota of votes to get elected. The Droop quota is commonly used, which is found by dividing the total number of valid votes cast by the number of seats to be filled plus one. Then, one is added to the quotient.
This is expressed in the formula: (total valid votes/ (total seats + 1)) + 1 . The system of ranking candidates by preference and redistributing votes lies at the core of this voting method.
Creative tastes vary; through proportional representation, the single transferable voting system preserves this innate subjectivity. The list of winners reflects the diversity of voters’ preferences.
STV proves to be a good alternative to traditional voting methods such as the simple plurality system because in the latter, a dominant style often outshines a less-popular genre, even if it’s by a slim margin. The single transferable vote system rather redistributes votes from eliminated candidates or those with surplus votes to other candidates that the voters also support.
When voters are required to vote for only one candidate, they often vote for the one who seems to have a higher chance of winning. This might be to prevent an undesirable outcome or avoid wasting one’s votes on candidates who seem to have no real chance of winning. Whatever the reason, it can prevent voters from honestly expressing their preferences.
In the awards context, votes should authentically reflect creative opinions. STV enables judges or voters to vote in the affirmative by indicating the submissions they prefer in order of preference.
By eliminating the need to vote against entries, it maintains the integrity of the votes. Judges and voters can confidently indicate a super-niche submission as their main choice, knowing that if it doesn’t win, their vote will transfer to their next-favourite choice.
When similar submissions appeal to the same judges or voters, traditional voting systems resort to vote splitting, where the support is divided among similar candidates. This can prove problematic by allowing the least preferred submission to win simply because the majority’s vote was split among similar entries. STV instead transfers votes among other ranked choices when one submission is eliminated or has surplus votes.
True inclusion means sharing the spotlight. Single transferable voting makes this a reality. Allowing judges and voters to express layered preferences gives underrepresented groups, genres and ideas a good chance of recognition.
For example, if a niche submission ranks second among most judges, it can still make it to the winning list even if it isn’t the first choice of many. This can empower a judging process that celebrates diversity by recognising the full spectrum of excellence.
Individual tastes can be complex. The fact that a judge appreciates one entry does not imply that they must dislike the others. The single transferable vote system accommodates the varying degrees of preference for submissions in an awards program.
To easily implement STV in your awards program, you need awards management software that offers it as a judging mode. In Award Force, STV is available as the Top pick judging mode. You can set it up by configuring a top pick score set to record picks, creating a judging round to control when judges can make their picks and creating a panel to assign who can pick which entries.
Implementing STV in your awards program will stop tactical voting, vote splitting, make your judging process more inclusive, recognise varying degrees of preferences and guarantee proportional representation.
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