Oscars 2024: How is ranked choice voting used?
In a break from the constant twists and turns of the presidential election season, ranked choice voting (RCV) is back in the public eye this month – as it will be used for most Academy Award nominations on January 23 (and again to select the Best Picture winner at the Oscars on March 10). It’s a reminder that RCV is used in many places and contexts beyond public elections. RCV is recommended in Robert’s Rules of Order, and is commonly used in elections for well-known associations.
Here are a few quick things to know about RCV and our friend Oscar (excellent insider analysis is also available from Steve Pond of The Wrap).
The gold standard at the Oscars
Because there are multiple nominees in every category – 10 for Best Picture, and 5 for other categories like Best Actor and Actress – the Oscars use the multi-winner, proportional form of RCV for nominations. This “gold standard” form of RCV is the basis of the Fair Representation Act, and is used in public elections in cities like Cambridge, MA and Albany, CA. It was adopted by the voters of Portland, OR in 2022, and will be used there beginning this year.
Why is multi-winner, proportional RCV the gold standard? It ensures that winners (or in this case, nominees) are chosen in proportion to the share of votes cast, and that nearly all voters will help elect a candidate or nominee they support. In other words, proportional RCV is how to make a representative body truly, well… representative.
Look at the diversity of recent Oscar nominees compared to other awards shows. Among last year’s Best Picture nominees alone, it’s hard to see the same voters nominating both the mass-appeal smash hit Top Gun: Maverick and the film festival darling Everything Everywhere All At Once. Same with Avatar: The Way of Water with its nearly half-billion dollar budget, and Triangle of Sadness with its $15 million budget.
But that’s exactly the point. The nominees represent voters who like action movies, voters who like sci-fi movies about the multiverse, and voters who like social commentary. They don’t just represent whatever group happens to be in the majority, to the exclusion of sizable minorities that should have their voices heard. (Remember this if both American Fiction and Barbie are nominated for Best Picture tomorrow!)
Together with reforms to the Oscars after the #OscarsSoWhite scandal in the mid-2010s – like doubling the number of the Academy’s female members, tripling the number of the Academy’s members of color, and a new effort requiring film productions to meet inclusion standards to compete for Best Picture – proportional RCV supports greater racial, ethnic, and gender diversity among nominees.
This includes 2023 Best Actress winner Michelle Yeoh, Best Supporting Actor winner Ke Huy Quan, and Best Director co-winner Daniel Kwan. Yeoh became the first Asian Best Actress winner.
RCV is better than alternative nomination methods
Schitt’s Creek, Ted Lasso, The Crown, Dopesick, Succession, and The White Lotus are all beloved shows (with most focusing on older, Whiter, and wealthier characters) – but are they loved enough to basically sweep recent Emmy nominations? In 2022, 13 of 14 Emmy Supporting Actor/Actress nominations went to Dopesick or The White Lotus. A remarkable 14 actors from Succession were nominated. In 2021, seven actors from Ted Lasso were nominated.
Why? Starting in 2016 (until the Television Academy dropped the system after the 2023 awards) the Emmys invited members to “vote for all entries in this category that you have seen and feel are worthy of a nomination.” In the election reform world, this is known as “approval voting.” While approval voting has benefits over single-choice voting, it is not proportional and runs into problems in a multi-winner (or multi-nominee) system like this one.
Think about it. Let’s say 51% of Television Academy voters like Succession, whereas 49% prefer a range of other shows. That same 51% can go through the entries, checking the box for every Succession actor – and successfully nominating each one. That 49% gets nothing. Approval voting also gives “more support to ‘safe’ choices that have more name recognition,” as FairVote’s Rob Richie has noted.
The Television Academy’s updated rules for this year’s Emmys still allowed voters to vote for multiple entries in each category. Yet rather than allowing voters to vote for as many entries as they wanted, they could only vote for as many entries as there were nomination slots in a category. So, if the Television Academy was going to hand out five nominations, voters could only vote for up to five entries.
This reduced the problem we saw last year somewhat, but even at this year’s Emmys just a few shows still received an outsized number of nominations.
But, it created a new problem. By limiting the number of entries a voter can support, shows that submit multiple actors or multiple episodes for consideration in a single category risk “splitting the vote” and making it less likely they’ll get any nomination. This could punish excellent shows for having too many great actors, forcing them to put just one before the voters instead of letting voters determine who should be nominated.
While Hollywood awards shows aren’t as big a deal as our democracy, this type of approval voting method can have dramatic (and negative) impacts in public elections. One party, community, or racial group could be totally shut out and left without a seat at the table. Or a party that runs multiple candidates who speak to the interests of a broad cross-section of voters could be left with no representation at all.
Hollywood leads the way
Keep an eye out: When the Academy adopted the single-winner form of ranked choice voting to select Best Picture winners in 2009, just five American cities used that better election system. But Hollywood is a trend-setter, and RCV started to grow in the years after the Oscars adopted it. RCV ramped up like some of the best thrillers – slow (up to about 10 cities by 2016), and then very fast (now in 50 cities, counties, and states)!
Will history repeat itself, with Tinseltown now leading the way on adoption of proportional RCV? Since 2019, proportional RCV has been adopted in five more cities, including Portland, Oregon in 2022. Portland is the largest city in Oregon, and will become the largest U.S. city to use proportional RCV when it’s implemented later this year.
We’re looking forward to the nominations next week, and we’ll be back for a Part 2 on RCV at the Oscars – how the single-winner form will be used to pick the Best Picture winner in March.
