E Pluribus Hugo

E Pluribus Hugo (or "EPH") is the name for the voting method invented to make the nominations process for the Hugo Awards more proportional. It was created in response to a problem where a minority of voters (split into two allied sub-factions who called themselves the "Sad Puppies" and "Rabid Puppies" respectively) were able to use coordinated bloc voting under the prior method to control a majority or even all of the nominations. EPH was designed for a situation where the list of eligible candidates is quite long; for instance, for the "Best Short Story" Hugo, all science fiction short stories that were published in past year. It works as follows:

1. Each voter nominates up to N candidates.
2. Until only S non-eliminated candidates remain (where S is the number of slots to fill), proceed as follows:
   1. Each ballot has 1 point. Divide that point equally among all the non-eliminated candidates it nominated.
   2. Find the two candidates with the lowest point total.
   3. Of those two candidates, eliminate the one which was nominated on the fewest ballots.

History

EPH was invented in 2015 by Jameson Quinn, in collaboration and cooperation with the commenters on the blog Making Light. It was analyzed in a paper by Jameson Quinn and Bruce Schneier. It was adopted by the World Science Fiction Society for Hugo nominations in votes in 2015 and 2016, and first used in 2017.