Borda Writes a Story

Last semester, I ran a short story contest in which UVa students submitted their stories, under certain constraints, and competed for a cash prize and to be published within a final collection. Of course, since this was a subjective competition, as the organizer I was tasked with creating a system in which the people’s submissions were to be analyzed fairly. If I were the sole judge, there would be inherent bias and skew towards something that I would want to read, so instead I picked a panel of judges to vote on who they thought the winners should have been.

Here’s where I encountered a problem, though. I wasn’t sure how to make it so there would end up with more than one winner when the voting was done. With majority rule, we might be able to vote on the winner in an ideal world, but we had 31 submissions and five judges, so even then there might not be any outcome due to a lack of consensus. This bothered me for a while until I settled on a Borda Count Method for voting. In this system, each judge would give their highest ranked story a score of 20, their second highest ranked story a score of 19, and so on, until they had 11 stories unranked, and the rest ranked between 1 and 20. After this, I summed the scores and then re ranked them according to these counts, leaving the lowest 11 out of the final book. With this method, even without a majority or a broad set of judges, we were able to achieve consensus with who the ultimate winner was as well as the following 19 people to be put in the book.