The Koufax Awards have three stages. ...  we will post a list of the categories and open the floor for nominations. Nominations are made by leaving a comment or by sending us an email. No specific form is necessary, but we do ask that you include the name of the blog (or post), the category for which it is nominated and a url to the blog (or post). You are welcome, even encouraged, to self-nominate, particularly for the categories for individual posts or series. After all, you know your work better than anyone else. You may nominate as many blogs as you wish in as many categories as you wish and you may make your nominations at one time or on multiple visits. If someone sends us a complete list of thousands of lefty blogs, I may decide to ignore it but that hasn't happened yet. Every blog mentioned in any nominating comment or email will receive a link when we post the full list of nominees.

After that full list of nominees is posted, we will ask for votes from that list to determine a group of 8-10 finalists in each category. The list of finalists will be determined by a count of the votes. We look for natural break points in the voting pattern to determine the number of finalists to include.

When voting (as opposed to nominating) starts, we ask that each person cast exactly one vote in each category. Two years ago there was some effort to game the system by multiple voting by persons or robots. Last year there was also some effort to game the system by multiple voting by persons. That does not work. Eric is in charge of voting security and he is very smart, very diligent, is armed with good technology, and has forgotten more about how the internet works that you or I will ever know. If Eric thinks something looks fishy, we will all look at it. Efforts to game the system not only will be ineffective but if they piss us off sufficiently, they risk public humiliation for the perpetrator. Don't do it.

After we generate our list of 8-10 finalists in each category, we will ask for votes for a winner. The winners are determined by a manual count of the votes. Once again, one vote per person per category please. Because we tabulate the votes manually, and as a result of the exponential growth of the Koufax Awards, it is a huge amount of work to organize and tabulate the votes. If we allow multiple voting, we would have to go to a machine count. After Florida in 2000, we do not think that is such a good idea.

After we tabulate the votes, we will announce the winners. It will take a few months to complete the process.

Please, please, please take the awards in the spirit in which they are offered. The Koufax Awards are supposed to be fun for you and for us. It takes an enormous amount of work (and money) for us to host the awards. If they are not fun, we have little reason to do so. Winning and losing is secondary to heaping praise upon your favorites and building the community. BE NICE.