Millions of viewers will tune into the Academy Awards on Sunday. They’ll learn whether Jimmy Kimmel can keep his material fresh during his fourth hosting stint and see who comes out on top in the “Barbenheimer” clash. At the same time, they’ll get a crash course on how to run better elections.
That’s because the Oscars have used ranked choice voting (RCV) — frequently called the “preferential ballot” by the Academy and its members — to pick the Best Picture winner since 2009 and for nominees in most categories since the 1930s.
Ranked choice voting is growing quickly in elections nationwide — it’s now used in Alaska and Maine. It could be on the ballot in four more states in November. But the Oscars offer a reminder that RCV is all around us. It’s not new or untested; it’s long been used successfully in elections worldwide and by private organizations and associations big and small, from the Academy Awards to the American Psychological Association to the Minnesota Farmers’ Union.
At the Oscars, RCV finds a Best Picture winner supported by a majority of voters in a crowded candidate field and ensures the nominees represent the full breadth of Academy members.
After the controversial snub of “The Dark Knight,” the Academy expanded the Best Picture category to 10 nominees in 2009 — and also created a potential problem. With 10 nominees, a film could win with just over 10 percent of the vote — meaning dissatisfaction for the 90 percent of voters who chose another film.
How did the Academy solve this problem? By giving voters backup choices.
With ranked choice voting, voters rank the candidates (films, in this case) in order of preference. They rank their favorite as their first choice, their next favorite as their second choice, and so on. If no movie gets a majority of voters’ first choices, the race goes to an “instant runoff.” The film with the fewest votes is eliminated, and voters who ranked that film first have their votes counted for their next choice. The process repeats until a single film wins with a majority.
RCV finds the most representative winner in a crowded field — a film with deep and broad support. The “easiest” way to win an RCV election is to get a majority of voters’ first choices; perhaps the juggernaut “Oppenheimer” might do that this year. But given how difficult that can be in a 10-film field, a film also improves its chances by appealing a broad range of voters — racking up second- and third-choice rankings if it doesn’t win on first choices alone.
You can’t win by being everyone’s second choice; you’ll get eliminated immediately. Consensus is the way to go. That’s not the same as boring and milquetoast.
Ultimately, using RCV, the Academy allows its voters to pick a majority-supported Best Picture from a wide-ranging set of nominees.
And about that nomination process: the Academy uses a multi-winner, proportional version of ranked choice voting to choose the nominees for Best Picture and almost all other categories. Nearly every Academy voter sees at least one candidate they’ve ranked on their ballot get nominated, going a long way toward ensuring the incredible diversity of the film industry is represented.
One can look at this year’s Best Picture nominees to see the effect of this form of RCV. This year, the same pool of voters nominated “Barbie,” “American Fiction” and “The Zone of Interest” for Best Picture. These three films couldn’t be more different, and their production budgets differ by more than $100 million!
Of course, the better Oscars voting process doesn’t guarantee everyone is happy with the outcome; that’s not how democracy works. “Barbie” fans may be upset if “Oppenheimer” takes home Best Picture on Sunday, and vice versa.
But when it comes to representing the will of its voters, ranked choice voting is far better than the single-choice, first-past-the-post voting system most Americans are used to. Right now, only one in 10 Americans give high ratings to how well our democracy represents our interests. Our elections routinely elect politicians who only appeal to a small minority of voters, causing historic levels of gridlock and dysfunction.
So when you turn on the Oscars on Sunday, look past the red carpet and the acceptance speeches — and think about improving our elections with ranked-choice voting.
Deb Otis is the director of research and policy at FairVote, a nonpartisan organization seeking better elections. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.
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