Voting geeks and political scientists can sometimes engage in quite vigorous arguments over which system of vote-counting is best. But entertainment value is rarely one of their criteria. It should be – and from my personal experiences as a tallyman in Ireland when I was a teenager, it is one on which “PR-STV”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote (proportional representation with a single transferable vote) scores very highly. In PR-STV, the voter votes for the candidates, recording her order of preference (Farrell 1, Tucker 2, … Sides 6 and so on). The votes are then counted. If a candidate reaches the quota with first preference votes, then she is deemed elected, and her surplus votes are distributed to other candidates, according to the second preferences recorded on them. If no candidate reaches the quota with her first preference votes, then the weakest candidate is eliminated, and his votes are distributed to the other candidates according to the second preferences, and so on, until all the vacant seats have been filled.
What makes this system entertaining is that much depends on the order in which candidates are eliminated. If one candidate goes first rather than another with a nearly equal share of votes, this can have significant knock-on repercussions for who gets elected and who doesn’t. The candidates are usually present at the count, and observing them, whey-faced, trying to figure out whether they will lose their jobs or not, as wizened old mountainy men, (who know their end of the constituency from decades of tramping its back-country roads and boreens, and have a good idea of where the second, third and fourth preferences are going) offer predictions based on the way that this or that ballot box seems to be going, is enormously entertaining for heartless teenagers with a predilection for politics.
Which brings me to my proposal. Under the new Oscars system, the ten Best Pictures nominees are chosen under some PR voting system, which may not be PR-STV but is likely to be at worst a closely related cousin. So the Oscar ceremony, rather than cutting to the smug accountant who presents the results as a _fait accompli_ at the end of the ceremony, should instead be cutting back and forth to a vote counting process which would be happening simultaneously, live. Alongside the main Oscar broadcast, one might even have CNN running an “Oscars Voting Special” in which underemployed political pundits could opinionate on who is winning and who is losing, who deserves to win and so on. This would make gripping television for a substantial subsection of the population who is uninterested in Oscar dresses and awards for best fly-grip camera and so on. I can see three possible objections. First – that CNN political pundits don’t actually know anything interesting or useful about the movie industry. This seems to me to be both true and uncompelling – they don’t (with a few exceptions) know anything useful or interesting about politics either. And they can always hire me for a moderately outrageous retainer fee. Second – that the US public would be unlikely to find processes involving complicated math at all entertaining. For rebuttal, I offer you the countless millions of baseball statistics bores to be found in this fine country. Third – that this will lead inevitably to family friction over whether we should watch the Oscars-proper ™ or the Oscars Special Vote Count edition ™ from the Finest Names in News (or whatever the slogan is this week). This seems to me to be the most plausible of the objections (but since I’m the only person in our household who really knows how to use the remote-controls, I’m not particularly worried about it meself).