Stacking the deck: reassigning preferential ballots

Rob has finished tabulating the results of the Awards Daily Simulated Oscar Ballot. We’ll have the numbers posted early Saturday morning, along with his detailed charts showing the internal breakdown of votes in each category. Here’s one set of numbers Rob ran for us that might be interesting as an overnight appeteaser. The question has been raised many times this season about how ballots cast for Best Picture will be redistributed between the top two films in the final round of counting. While our results can’t be expected to match or predict which way the Academy ballots will fall, the numbers this week seem to indicate at least one surprise misconception about voter preferences.

It’s been assumed that voters drawn to a certain type of film will lean one way or another in their secondary choices. For example, might we expect voters who like their movies traditional with an uplifting spirit to find The Fighter and The King’s Speech hold similar appeal. We might expect that. But our expectations would be incorrect, at least as applies to the nearly 2000 voters who participated in our ballot. Rob’s number show, across the board, the majority of voters who first cast their ballot for one of the “lower 8” tier movies, eventually saw that ballot fall into the stack for The Social Network.

What does it mean? A couple of straightforward interpretations, after the cut.

This would seem to indicate, as Rob says, “that the preferential ballot might work in TSN’s favor.” Yes, it certainly did benefit The Social Network among ballots cast by AD readers. But just as we have to constantly reminder ourselves that Critics don’t vote for the Oscars, we have to remember that AD readers don’t vote for the Oscars either. (at least not all of them do.) So instead of using this chart to demonstrate that the preferential ballot might tip toward The Social Network in this example. A more generalized deduction might be to say that the ballot redistribution will favor whichever movie is already a clear favorite. Whichever movie that may be.