Hell yeah, it’s everybody’s least favorite part of the year again! That’s right — it’s time for community voting in the Homicidols Best Of 2019! Or, more accurately, right now it’s not yet time to vote: It’s time for Maniac to ponderously explain the convoluted process by which you will vote, dampening both your enthusiasm and expectations!

Final candidates for each award are below, organized as only Kerrie can do it. Other than the year that this was completely crowdsourced (2016), this is the most wild-ass the official final ballot has ever been. It’s also, not at all coincidentally, the year most likely to generate wota tears and kvetching like you usually only see at sporting events in Cleveland. So, to meet some of the inevitable head-on (and for the sake of transparency, too), here’s how the sausage got made:

1. Kerrie put together a tracking sheet for all of the awards (including new ones we made up) beginning basically at this time last year
2. Every six weeks or so, she’d remind us to pretty please add our favorite things to it, and several times asked for additional outside input
3. As a result, I think the fewest nominees in any one category was like 10, and it was for Letdown
4. We had some categories with like 35 nominations, just from the preliminaries
5. In mid-November, we had an internal vote to select our top 5 in each category
6. Notably, while this created favorites, it did not actually eliminate anything, as there are only six of us and our tastes are all over the map, so there were lots of ties and near-misses, so anything withing spitting distance of a top 5 status was kept as a reference
7. We then solicited additional public nominations in all categories
8. The idea being that, if public nominations confirmed what we had, great; if a whole bunch of nominations popped up for something that was close, it would move up on the list; if things were still close, we’d defer to the community (and proportionally at that — if, say, there were three Team votes for a thing that got three public votes (total: six), and a thing with two Team votes and four public (also six!), the one with more public votes won out)
9. Considering that there are literally thousands of you and six of us, if you don’t like the final pool, you only have yourself to blame
10. And voila, we wound up with these final candidates for all awards!

Voting will start on Monday. To break things up into sensible chunks, there are three ballots; one will be released each day Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, and each will stay open until approximately midnight the day after it opens or until Maniac feels like going to bed or forgets to close it and does it in the morning instead. So: Monday-Tuesday; Tuesday-Wednesday; Wednesday-Thursday. On Friday, we’ll congratulate ourselves on a job well done. Then we publish the Homicidols Best of 2019 like so:

1. Monday, December 16: Community winners, which are the real published official final results
2. Tuesday, December 17: Team will give out our takes on it all and our personal awards
3. Monday, December 30: We’ll publish the Year in Review, in a different format and with different focus than in the past

Sound good? Great! So check back in on Monday and we’ll get this party started!

The Ballot/s