UBC 1-time #votermedia results & calculations [#amselections]

Congrats to all participants in the UBC AMS elections that ended yesterday! It got messy at times, but ended with a success for democracy, it seems to me.

- Results for elections & votermedia

- Detailed vote counts

If you'd like to see how we calculate the voter media awards from the vote counts, see this spreadsheet. In words, we find a cutoff number of votes that will allocate the exact total $2000 award pool, when we award each contestant the amount of money supported by that many votes for that amount or higher. (Well, the spreadsheet is coded in terms of percentiles counting up from $0 instead of votes counting down from the top, but it comes to the same thing.)

One extra wrinkle is that we interpolate the votes. Voting is in $125 increments, but we wanted to calculate awards in $25 increments. So (for example) a vote for $250 is treated as 1/5 of a vote for each of these amounts: $200, $225, $250, $275, $300. (Votes for $0 are not interpolated.) The spreadsheet first shows what the awards would have been without interpolation (easier to follow), and then the actual awards with interpolation.

Last year's AMS 1-time votermedia contest had 4 times as much funding -- $8000. So all the increments were 4 times the size -- see spreadsheet.

Comparing the two years' results, I think UBC students "get" votermedia better this year, making awards that correspond more with the quality of the blogs. For example, Radical Beer Tribune did not place first the way it did last year when most observers found that odd.

The above results are for the 1-time VoterMedia (1VM) contests on the annual AMS elections ballot. We also have Continuous VoterMedia (CVM) running year-round on this ballot.

[See also Twitter: #votermedia OR #amselections]