NBA MVP Voting

We mentioned in class briefly that many sports polls are done by the Borda Count in which the voters rank teams or players and the teams/players get points based on how they are ranked. I decided to explore if there had been any controversies due to the use of this type of election system. As a basketball fan, I looked into NBA MVP voting over the last couple decades. For context, the NBA MVP voting system is a modified Borda count method in which voters rank their top five players and the points are distributed as 10 for 1st place, 7 for 2nd place, 5 for 3rd, 3 for 4th, and 1 for 5th.

There has only been one time since this system's inception that the player who garnered the most first-place votes did not win the MVP. In the 1990 race, Magic Johnson got 69.1% of the possible points, while Charles Barkley got 66.7%, and Michael Jordan got 62%. However, Magic Johnson got only 27 first-place votes as compared to Charles Barkley's 38 and Michael Jordan's 21. Despite Charles Barkley's significantly higher number of first-place votes, Magic Johnson received 38 second-place votes compared to Barkley's 15 and Jordan got 25. Barkley would have won a plurality system just based on voting for your top candidate, but his inability to successfully amass non-first place votes hurt him in this modified Borda count method. As the NBA didn't release full voting data until more recently, I couldn't determine the Condorcet winner in this example, but I did look into the full voting data for the last three races and all three winners using this system were also the Condorcet winner.