Following on from my entry on voting on p2p networks, some of the same considerations apply (to a lesser extent) to voting for various awards, especially public or semi-public ones (as opposed to jury-decided), for instance the Ditmars. Thus, it might be good to use Condorcet voting for them, too.
The main advantage as far as awards are concerned is that a voter can rank only some of the nominees, and it doesn't count as a vote for or against the unranked ones. Thus, a voter would rank only the books which he or she has read, without this automatically counting as a vote against those he or she hasn't.
Currently, voters feel obliged to read all the nominees in a category before voting; conversely, and perhaps more importantly, people who haven't read all the nominees feel obliged to abstain, even if they do have an opinion on those they have read. A Condorcet-style system would allow people who have read only nominees B and E, say, to vote for B over E (or vice versa) without unduly affecting the ranking of the other works.
This applies especially so to ephemereal nominees; in 2003, Ditmars were awarded to a convention and a magazine launch. How is one to vote for or against "Borderlands: that which scares us..." if one was several thousand kilometres away at the time? How is one to vote on a theatre run which is over by the time the nominations are published?
The Ditmars currently use "a preferential system", but as far as I can see, the rules don't say which. The site with the rules is down at the moment, but the google cache / view as HTML works
Possible anomaly: disjoint fan sets. It's possible for the method to produce two winners in a situation where there were no votes comparing them against each other. On the other hand, if there were two productions on at the same time in different cities, and they were honestly the best things the respective audiences have seen all year, there's no sane way of deciding between them anyway.
Possible anomaly: restricted items. The method would allow nominees that very few of the voters have seen to win. To some extent, this is ameliorated by the nomination method (which uses the approval system of voting), but it would be better if the voting method itself contained sufficient safeguards. Update 24.11.2004: The Debian method of voting combines condorcet with approval, thus perhaps being a good candidate.
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