Hi, I'm a member of bioinformatics.org, and I just got the Franklin Award ballot email.

In the future, you might consider voting methods other than standard plurality voting for your awards and polls. In democracy, just as in the scientific world, the most obvious algorithm is not necessarily the best, and furthermore, the definition of best changes over time. Popular methods that are considered to be "better" than plurality voting include (but are not restricted to) approval voting, Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), Condorcet voting, and range voting. Plurality is subject to vote splitting (spoiling), whereby two candidates perceived as similar by the electorate can wind up defeating one another, even if the majority of the electorate would prefer that one of them be the winner.

Which method to choose is a matter of some debate; using criteria commonly applied by political scientists, it has been "proven" that there is no perfect, objectively best voting system. Robert's Rules of Order now indicates IRV (which it calls preferential voting) as the preferred way of conducting votes in organizations, and IRV has a lot of momentum among political electoral reform advocates. www.fairvote.org has more info on IRV. Debian Linux uses Condorcet. IRV and Condorcet look the same to voters (ranked choices); it's just the tabulation that is different. All these methods are probably described by Wikipedia, although be aware that each voting method has fiercely partisan and usually very intellectual supporters, and I would expect churn and conflict in the voting method entries.

For politics, I am leaning toward Instant Runoff Voting, but IRV has its bitter opponents (see www.fairvote.org/blog/index.php/whyirv/ and the enthusiastic attacks by the range voting fan). The various voting methods will behave differently depending on application -- a bioinformatics.org poll is different from a political election in a variety of ways.

Frankly, it would be interesting to have people vote using multiple methods and publish all ballots and results - electoral reform people would be interested in analyzing the data. If the voting methods did not establish a consensus winner, you could choose by editorial fiat.

Anyway, something for you to chew on.

Regards,
Kevin Murphy
murphy@genome.chop.edu