In here to comment that in my field this is called a modified (by being able to choose "No Award") Alternative Vote.

This is not so much about how to fill out the ballot, but instead about how to tally the votes once the ballots are all filled out, but anyway:

The Hugos use the "instant-runoff" system, meaning that until a clear winner is found they repeatedly eliminate the candidate with the fewest first place votes. This system does not have the Condorcet property: it is possible for a candidate to beat every other candidate in head-to-head contests, but still lose the overall election. For instance, this would happen when there are two equally matched candidates A and B whose supporters hate each other but both like C; C could be the Condorcet winner but eliminated in the first round.

Instead, the Schulze method looks appealing to me, and does have the Condorcet property. Its disadvantage (and perhaps this is important for the Hugos) is that it requires computer software to tally the votes rather than being easy to perform by hand, and it is not even easy to explain exactly how it works.

Another alternative that could be done easily enough by hand is the Borda count, the favorite method of voting expert Don Saari; this is the one where you tally 5 points for a first place vote, 4 points for a second place votes, etc., and just go by the plurality of points. It also doesn't have the Condorcet property, but as Wikipedia says "Borda count tends to favour candidates supported by a broad consensus among voters, rather than the candidate who is necessarily the favourite of a majority".

I've done this before so it was easy, but you're right. By the way, when I realized I'd made a mistake, there was no way to bring up the original again, in spite of the voter ID# so I had to re-enter all my rankings. Not the end of the world, but that should not be difficult to write the software once then to pass it on to the next year's administrators. Or is this another case of fandom re-inventing the wheel every year?

"Or is this another case of fandom re-inventing the wheel every year?"

It helps if someone tells the Hugo Administrator and next year that's Todd Dashoff. While LoneStarCon has yet to list departmental emails, their all purpose email appears to be: info@lonstarcon3.org.

Whoops! That's info@lonestarcon3.org .

Serge Broom @3, I was thinking that they only need to get someone to write it right once, then keep using that code, but then I realized that that Worldcon committees probably haven't standardized on a common web back-end.

"As you can see, this leads to a lot of ballot counting. While you can do this by hand, it is cumbersome and time-consuming to do so. Some years ago, a fellow named Jeffrey Copeland wrote a computer program to automate this process, and most recent Hugo Award administrators have used this program to count the ballots and produce the mounds of statistics so beloved by Hugo watchers."
http://www.thehugoawards.org/the-voting-system/

7
And before that, it was using a program that goes back to at least 1971 (in PL/I, no less).

2
Actually, if you look at the published balloting results, you can see that the voting does change, sometimes by quite a bit, as the trailers are eliminated. (The other places are determined by the same method, but first eliminating the nominees already placed.) That's why, unless there's really an overwhelming choice, it's close to impossible to predict who will win. (It also makes ballot-box stuffing pretty difficult.)

D. Eppstein @ 2:

Instead, the Schulze method looks appealing to me, and does have the Condorcet property. Its disadvantage (and perhaps this is important for the Hugos) is that it requires computer software to tally the votes rather than being easy to perform by hand, and it is not even easy to explain exactly how it works.

Here in Australia we use preferential / instant run-off for pretty much everything, and yes, one of its key advantages is that it's pretty easy to explain and pretty easy to count. Another is that, provided there are a large number of voters, your best strategy is to rank the candidates in the order you prefer: there's no "tactical voting".

Arrow's Theorem tells us that there is no perfect voting system (though first-past-the-post is clearly inferior), and so we have to choose trade-offs. While the Condorcet criterion is nice, I personally (and it is a matter of personal taste) choose simplicity as being more important.

Thank you for this explanation! I'm going to Worldcon for the first time this year. I'd asked experienced folks how the voting works, and was mystified by their explanations. Turns out that they hadn't looked at this ballot yet.

Just wanted to let everybody know that we have heard you and we appreciate the input. The Hugo ballot has been updated.

P J Evans: I was very confused by last year's ballots until the runoff process was explained. What the Best Novel category actually showed was a large concordance between the readers of two of the authors; when one of them was eliminated, the other got almost all of the votes from those people.

13
I've seen that too. It's why looking at the results is so much fun.

And it's been common over the last few years for two or three Doctor Who episodes to get nominated (three, this year) -- you'd expect a lot of voters to rank those similarly, so when one gets eliminated most of its preferences would flow to another.