Star Trek New Voyages / Phase II Fan Films - Germany

Now that the Hugo Award winners have been announced, the actual counts for each nominee can be released. But before we discuss the final voting, it's probably important to discuss the nomination phase.

Only people who were members of this year's Denvention 3 (and people who went to last year's convention Nippon 2007 in Yokohama, Japan) were able to nominate.

So, lots of members submitted nominating ballots, indicating who they would like to see on the final ballot. People made all kinds of suggestions. In fact, there were 259 nominating ballots cast (and each ballot could list as many as five nominations). So, the five productions that got the most nominations from people would become the five final nominees that would go onto the final ballot.

How did we do in our efforts to get nominated back in March? There were others of course - productions that got fewer than eight nominations. But this just shows the top 15 nomination getters. Here's the breakdown of the nomination phase:

As you can see, we made it into the top five-so we got to be on the final ballot. It takes surprisingly few people to submit nominations to get an item on the ballot. For example, "Captain Jack Harness" secured the fifth available spot with just 24 people nominating it (our thanks go out to the 48 people who submitted nominations for "World Enough and Time.")

So, once we got on the Final Ballot and everyone had only the top five nominees, how did they rank their preferences in the Final Ballot voting phase? Well, this one is a little harder to explain, since it involves "ranking" and an "instant run-off" ballot.

There were 649 final ballots counted for "Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form). So, 649 people decided the outcome of this category. (This isn't all that many, but it's actually about twice the number who vote in most years.)

Every ballot is placed into one of five piles depending upon what the first choice was. (Well, actually, there are six piles-because in addition to the five choices on the ballot, you can also vote that No Award be given).

So after you put all the ballots into the six piles based on the first preference, what was that outcome?

So, Doctor Who "Blink" is winning, but we're not done yet. We have an "instant run-off." We take all ballots for the nominee that had the fewest votes and redistribute them based on what their second preference was. So, we take all the "No Award" ballots (since this got fewer votes than anything else) and look at the second choice and place them into the piles based on the second choice. (In answer to your question, yes, some people say "I prefer that No Award be given, but my second choice is "Captain Jack Harkness.")

So, let's see how this looked after we redistributed all the "No Award" ballots based on the second preference:

(Only "Razor" and "Captain Jack Harkness" went up-by one each. So it looks like only two people listed a second choice after their "No Award" preference.)

Okay, we're getting there. Let's do another "instant run-off" and take all the "Captain Jack Harkness" ballots and redistribute them according to their second choice. (Well, except for one of them-that one already got into the "Captain Jack Harkness" pile as a second choice, so it will be sorted by the third choice.) Now let's see how it looks:

Okay, it's still coming along. Let's redistribute the "Human Nature" / "Family of Blood" ballots based on the next highest choice:

So, we finally have a winner for First Place! "Blink" (with 351 votes) now has more than half of the 649 ballots. So even if we take all of the "World Enough and Time" ballots and if, hypothetically every single one listed "Razor" as the next choice, "Razor" still couldn't get more than "Blink." So "Blink" is the winner.

All this rigmarole only gets us to the First Place winner. If you want to know the Second Place winner, you have to start over from scratch. Take *all* the ballots and place them into one of five piles (four nominees and No Award). Don't put any of them in a "Blink" pile. (There is no "Blink" pile for second place.) I'll save time: here's what you get after placing them in five piles and resorting the lowest remaining pile over and over again four times until you come up with a second place winner:

And "Human Nature" / "The Family of Blood" gets the Second Place position over "Razor." Having put "Blink" and "Human Nature" / "The Family of Blood" in First and Second Place, we now we do the same thing for Third Place:

And "Razor" beats out "Captain Jack Harkness."

Now onto Fourth Place:

And "Captain Jack Harkness" beats "World Enough and Time."

We do it again to determine Fifth Place.

"World Enough and Time" gets more votes than "No Award." So, more people thought we should get Fifth Place than people who thought we should be given No Award at all-not even the Fifth Place position.

"World Enough and Time:" "Eh, it's better than nothing!"

(Thanks to everyone who took the time and trouble to purchase a Denvention 3 membership and who nominated us and then voted for us on the Final Ballot.)