People who exhibit excellence in some fashion receive awards. However, the problem is that, with 7.6 billion people on the planet, there is never only one person who exhibits excellence. So an Award Vote is a great option to help decide who is the most excellent out of all the excellent people at a given action or idea.

An Award Vote is one where an award is given based on a vote by an audience or group of peers, as opposed to being given based on a judge’s, or a panel of judges’ opinion. For example, in American Idol, the winning contestants are decided by audience voting. School have votes to award titles of “Prom King” and “Prom Queen”, and these are decided by the candidates’ student peers.

Awards are a great way to get member engagement with your organization. Being an individual who is nominated receive an award is a positive experience, as there is a recognition of their value, which can encourage them to be more involved with the organization.  Of course, winning an award is a highly positive experience too! The winner’s efforts to win the award are likely to continue, particularly if they are receiving recognition for their effort. And for all members, asking for their vote to decide which individual should win the award creates a sense of involvement and ownership. It can also increase the likelihood that members will share their opinions in the future. 

If the award is a single-winner award, then any of our single-winner voting methods will work for your vote. The most common of the single-winner voting methods is plurality, where voters pick the one candidate that they feel should win the award.

Other single-winner voting methods include:

Preferential
The preferential voting method has several benefits over using a plurality voting method. It provides a better sense of what voters actually think of all of the candidates. It also allows a voter to indicate that they would be comfortable with several candidates winning the award, because if their most preferred candidate gets eliminated, then their vote then transfers to their next most preferred candidate, and so on until a candidate receives a majority of the vote.

Approval
Although approval looks like a multi-winner voting method, it works as a single-winner voting method. Voters are allowed to pick an unlimited number of candidates from the listed options, and at the end of the vote, the candidate who was selected by the most voters wins. It is between a plurality and a preferential vote, because voters can select all the candidates that they are comfortable with winning, similar to a preferential vote, but the selecting process is as simple a plurality voting, where voters select those candidates they approve and there is no indication of preference among the candidates that the voter has chosen.

For a scenario where multiple winners for a single award, any of ElectionBuddy’s multiple-winner voting methods will work. Again, the most common would be plurality.

Voters are not required necessarily to to pick two candidates, even if two can win the award — the question can be set up so that voters could choose either one or both candidates. Other multi-winner voting methods include:

Preferential
Preferential was listed as a single-winner voting method, but it can also function as a multiple-winner voting method. A subset of preferential, STV (Single Transferable Vote), is used to calculate multiple winners when preferential is used with multiple vacancies.

Cumulative
Although an uncommon choice for awards, cumulative can be used if you have a multiple-winner scenario, and this allows the voter to allocate multiple votes to multiple candidates.

Create and test an awards ballot in ElectionBuddy for free.