The plan for this file is to include more detailed information as to exactly how the poll works, what the rules are, and what voters should know and do, beyond the more general descriptions in the methodology section of the index file, and the invitation file. That's a tall order, and one never adequately achieved during the course of any poll.
This file is a work in progress. There's an old adage that I learned from construction but seems to apply to all engineering projects: not until the end of a project will you know everything you needed to know at the beginning. So while I try to initially try to think things through, every poll brings new surprises, and requires further refinement of my thinking.
Whereas the ballot form attempted to keep things simple, the intent here is to be as precise and complete as possible. This is important because the real world doesn't always follow the neat rules the poll imagines. And we wish to deal with such discrepancies as fairly as possible.
A preliminary ballot was mailed out to the Jazzpoll email list on June 13. This attempted to reach about 205 qualified critics. The mailing list is implemented using GNU Mailman, which is designed to facilitate group discussions, but we use it only for simple announcements. The key thing here is that all submissions to the list are moderated, so only the admin, Tom Hull, can send messages to the list. The good thing about the list is that one click can send a message to everyone. The bad thing is that there is no way to guarantee delivery. List mail can get trapped or even rejected by spam filters, which most people rarely if ever look at, because they're mostly full of crap. The list is hosted by my hullworks.net server. We had a lot of problems with it in past years, but as of February 2025, we have a new, more reputable ISP, which is working better (although it's still hard to measure).
An alternative method for sending invitations out is for Hull to send them directly from his email account. For this, he creates a template, then runs it through a "mail merge" utility to fill up a "drafts" folder with personalized messages. These can then be sent out one at a time (sometimes with additional personal notes), but email sent that way is laborious, not least because the rate at which it can be sent is throttled by the ISP. It takes 30-40 seconds to generate a batch of messages, and 3-6 hours to send them out. But this method does reach invitees who don't see the list mail.
I used this method to send out two batches of invites. The first was on June 24, when I send invites to about 90 critics who weren't on the mail list. About a third were people who had voted in 2024, and should have been added to the list, so I also added them. The rest were people who were invited in 2024 but who hadn't responded. I only add them to the list once they've responded and indicated an interest (e.g., by voting). I sent an additional round of invites out on June 29 to people who were on the initial list -- who should have received an invite on June 13 -- but who hadn't yet responded. That way, we could be sure that we had made a "best effort" attempt to invite everyone on our list.
The individualized letters were based on the "short-form" invite, which has less emphasis on rules and regulations, in hope of being more inviting. Both invites are designed to minimize spam scores, which among other things means limiting links to one.
Voters were asked to complete their ballots and send them as Reply, or otherwise as email directly to Tom Hull. (Please do not Reply to List, as any mail you send to the list will be trapped and discarded.) You may insert your picks into the form provided, or simply note the categories and picks. Anything that's clear will be accepted (subject to rules explained below), and anything that isn't clear will be questioned and mutually hashed out. It is better if you provide your ballot in the body of an email message, not as an attachment. While we can handle most attachments, doing so takes unnecessary steps, causing unnecessary work.
You don't need to do anything special to format your ballot. You only need to specify the artist name and album title, but we would also ask for the label name. Whenever a new album gets a vote, we research to verify its credits, title, label, and if necessary record and/or release dates, and store this information in a single data file. (Hull also for his own purposes maintains a separate tracking file, which maintains the same information in a slightly different format, but can be used as a reference in checking votes.) Thus, your precise entry helps us, while your errors are corrected when we present your final ballot. In some cases, yours are not actually errors, but we have certain conventions and standards for parsing artist, album, and labels, and try to apply them consistently to all ballots.
Those "conventions and standards" should be written down at some point, but they are tricky, and it would take a lot of work to cover everything. Some were set down by Francis Davis, like using '&' for albums by two artists, and using '-' for albums by three or more artists. Others were developed by Tom Hull, based on many years of parsing album covers and turning them into lists. In two notable cases, we add date information to the parenthesized label field: for Rara Avis albums, we include the recording year dates (if known, and if not already expressed in the title); at the end of the field (after the label name), we also add a notation for albums that were not released in the current year (e.g., '24 for albums released in 2024). While these date notes are interesting in themselves, they also help us check for boundary conditions (the 10-year rule for Rara Avis; the possibility that previous year albums may have old votes that we need to consider).
The year-end poll focuses on records that were initially released in the calendar year 2025. Since year-end ballots are sent out in mid-November, with a voting deadline of mid-December, earlier iterations of the poll tried to divide the year's releases around Thanksgiving or Dec. 1. But there was little value, and no small amount of confusion, in trying to slice the calendar year that way. There aren't many December releases, but some get promoted early, and voters who have them often want to vote for them now, rather than holding them back a year over an arbitrary release date.
On the other hand, many voters only become aware of albums well after their release date. For that reason, we allow voters to vote for previous-year albums. And while we advise voters to only consider previous-year albums that were released late and were "new to them," while discouraging them from wasting votes on albums that already polled well, we don't enforce any such restrictions. We do reject votes for albums that came out before the previous year. At some point voting for old music, no matter how precious it is to the voter, runs against the purpose of the poll, and we've somewhat arbitrarily decided that dividing line is Jan. 1 of the previous year. (This is actually a pretty good reason to not vote for any previous year albums.)
Sometimes, an album is released in one year, but only gets significant promotion during the following year, so that more people discover it in the second year than in the first. We have a rule for this case: if any album gets more votes in the second year, we add however many votes/points the record got in its first year. The only really significant case where this has been applied was on an Eric Dolphy archival set, which appeared one year as digital, then next year as CD, and won Rara Avis that year. This rule is based on one used by the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Poll, which allowed Michael Jackson's Thriller to win the year after it was first released. Other than these two cases, the rule has had very little effect.)
External link here to explain points system. Still need to collect documentation on that here (it is currently scattered about).
For New Albums and Rara Avis, voters are asked to submit ranked lists, in descending order. Each rank is converted to points, using a sliding scale.
For up to 10 New Albums, the scale is: 1: 3.0; 2: 2.4; 3: 2.0; 4: 1.8; 5: 1.6; 6: 1.4; 7: 1.3; 8: 1.2; 9: 1.1; 10: 1.0.
For up to 5 Rara Avis, the scale is: 1: 2.0; 2: 1.6; 3: 1.4; 4: 1.2; 5: 1.0.
This point scale was introduced for the 2024 Mid-Year Poll, and is being used for the 2024 Poll. Previously, the point scale was linear: from 10 to 1 for up to 10 New Albums, and from 3 to 1 for up to 3 Rara Avis. While the linear scale was easier to calculate, Hull felt that the range between top and bottom points was more likely to distort the results. Experience with assigned points polls, like the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop, suggest that, even when given complete license to assign weights to ranks, voters will either assign equal rank or stay within a fairly narrow band. (In P&J, voters can divide 100 points among 10 albums, with a maximum of 30 and a minimum of 5. That's 6-to-1, but maximum votes there are rare, so a 3-to-1 range is more typical of voters who seriously rank.) Davis considered and rejected the Pazz & Jop formula, figuring it was excessively burdensome both for voters and for himself. Part of Hull's reasoning was that in the Mid-Year Poll, there would be fewer voters, so the point-scale distortions of the linear system would be exaggerated. I doubt there is any objective way to optimize a points system, but intuitively the more compressed scale seems to be better at reflecting both the popular breadth and the depth of enthusiasm voters hold for their picks.
Davis also allowed the option of unranked lists, probably because some voters insisted on them. (In later years, he disparaged them, sometimes not even mentioning the option in his invite letters -- but we did always count them.) Davis simply divided the total points that would be given for a ranked list (55 for 10 New Albums picks, 6 for 3 Rara Avis picks) and divided them by the number of picks, so they were scored at 5.5 and 2.0 points. Hull found that when he mentioned the option of unranked lists, the number of critics opting for them roughly doubled. So he proposed scoring unranked lists at 1 point each. This gives voters an incentive to rank, but it's not so large as to greatly distort the results. In the 2024 Mid-Year Poll, the share of unranked ballots was about the same as it had been in recent years, so it didn't seem to be much disincentive at all. But voters who rank their lists are doing extra work, and providing us with extra information, which would seem to justify the extra points.
Early on, Davis decided to add three special categories: two to highlight styles or genres that are indelibly significant parts of the jazz legacy but which tend to be overlooked or marginalized in top-ten lists; and one to help identify new musicians who are likely to become future stars. He asked voters to pick one record in each of these categories, and stressed that if they had picked any special category in their top-ten, they should name it (their highest pick, if multiple) as their category choice.
While simple enough, Hull noticed that many voters (25-50%) skipped these categories, while others had multiple candidates and squaring them with the rule tended to be contentious. For the 2024 mid-year poll, with fewer voters and fewer albums to choose from, Hull dropped the special categories. Davis asked him to reconsider so for the 2024 year-end poll, Hull decided to ask voters to choose up to 3 albums in each category, in addition to any albums already chosen in the top-ten list and designated as category-eligible. Thus, a specialist could wind up selecting as many as 13 albums in a category (although it's unlikely that many, or possibly any, will).
The 2025 mid-year poll again did not ask for votes in these special categories. Mid-year voters may skip the rest of this section.
Voting in these categories is completely optional. Voters who have no strong choices should skip them, rather than try to fill out all the slots. Short lists are always acceptable (even in New Albums, although it is rare to find a creditable critic who doesn't like at least ten albums -- I know of many, like myself, whose end-of-year lists extend much longer).
There is no point system in these special categories: the lists may or may not be ordered: the top-ten are reproduced in the order given, followed by any extra choices, but each album is given equal weight (in effect, 1 point).
For the special categories, most selections will come from New Albums, but it is possible to pick Rara Avis albums. A Rara Avis Debut would be rather anomalous.
Vocal Jazz is for albums that feature one or more vocalists. It is not necessary for vocalist(s) to be named in the artist credit. It is left to the voter to decide which albums qualify. For example, some voters may pick rappers/spoken word artists, or may focus on repertoire singers, or styles like vocalese, or singer-songwriters, or even look beyond customary jazz bounds. Some may regard a particular performance as central to an album, while others may not. In past years, we've been known to quarrel about such interpretations. We've done less and less of that over the years, and none recently.
What counts as Latin Jazz is also left up to the voter. Davis founded the category because he felt that the Village Voice, as a New York weekly paper, was often negligent in covering what he viewed as an essential part of the New York jazz scene. Since then, the music and the poll have gone nationwide and (to some extent) international. One result is that there are many views of what should or should not be included as Latin Jazz.
One consensus rule seems to be that Latin Jazz is defined by its rhythmic signatures, and not by the ethnicity of the artists. One striking example occurred in 2021, when Miguel Zenón released two albums: his Law Years: The Music of Ornette Coleman got more points in New Albums, but his The Art of the Bolero won Latin Jazz (23-to-1; it got 37.5 points in New Releases, vs. 63.5 for Law Years). In another case, I've had a voter argue that his 3rd or 4th top-ten pick was the his Latin Jazz choice -- although his top two picks were widely supported in Latin Jazz, he didn't consider them enough to qualify.
Given this range of critical opinion, and my own tone-deafness on the subject, it is important for voters to designate which of their top-ten albums they consider to be Latin Jazz. I may query some voters if they don't, but I will accept their designations.
The idea behind the Debut category is to identify new artists the first year they release work. The strict definition of this is that any artist who has previously released an album as the leader or principal named credit is henceforth ineligible. Before 2024, this definition was even stricter: an album was ineligible if any named credit had previously released.
Albums with group credits have always been disparaged. A group is ineligible if any member of the group has released previous work, as an individual, collaborator, or group member. Forming a new group does not allow for a second chance Debut. (Needless to say, or one should think, a new "supergroup" like Artemis is never eligible for Debut.)
An aliases is treated as a name for an individual. If the individual is eligible, the first use of the alias is eligible. A name change, like a new alias, does not allow for a second chance Debut.
As of 2024, we are allowing that the strict rule may be a bit too strict, and that voters should be allowed some leeway in deciding whether to overlook previous work, most often because it was obscure -- some possible reasons may be: self-released with no outside promotion, digital only, very limited physical releases, work in unrelated groups or as non-primary credits, little or no critical notice. This leeway is much more limited than we allow for Vocal or Latin Jazz. But a vote for anyone who clearly isn't eligible will be rejected.
I want to cut down on the amount of research I have to do to qualify or disqualify albums. One rule of thumb is that anyone who has previously receive votes in the poll is ineligible. Of those who haven't, the first test will be whether I've heard of the person. If I have, I may already know enough to reject the vote. If I haven't, I'll do some research. Either way, I'll allow the vote if I don't see any clear reason to disqualify it. The resulting list should approximately satisfy the intent of identifying new artists in the first year of their work.
This section has been moved into a separate file.
[Need to distill the general points here.]