It’s been a year? Wow. Last year at this time, there was a run of silly votes for what is called the Shorty awards on Twitter — you may recall that a couple of quacks, Mike Adams and Joe Mercola, snapped and started cheating furiously to win the Health category, to no avail: their votes were mostly disqualified. It was hilarious.

Anyway, I got an email asking me to promote another set of candidates this year. If you already have a twitter account — you don’t get to create one for the sole purpose of voting — you can follow the directions below.

I was hoping I could get some help adding a skeptical bent to the Shorty Awards. Last year the health category had Mike Adams and Joe half-man-half-drink Mercola strongly in the lead at the time we noticed, but thanks to their followers vote rigging (disqualifying Adams and having over half of Mercola’s votes revoked, twice) as well as strong support from the skeptical community we managed to get Rachael Dunlop to legitimately and overwhelmingly take out the category.

They’re back on again this year and I’m hoping we can get support from the atheist and skeptical community worldwide from the word go this year, and I’d love it if you could mention it on your blogs and podcasts.

To vote one simply needs a twitter account with prior activity. Accounts created just for voting could result in disqualification of the nominee. Once someone has an account, it’s as simple as sending a tweet in the formats of “I nominate (@person) for a Shorty Award in (#category) because (reason)” or a shorter version of “#shortyawards (@person) (#category) (reason)”.

I have a few recommendations for voting, but of course everyone is more than entitled to vote for whomever they’d like. You are allowed to vote for multiple different people in a single category, so it’s easy enough to vote for a requested person as well as who you’d prefer to see take it out.

“I nominate @DrRachie for a Shorty Award in #health because she does such standup work against quacks.”
“I nominate @BastardSheep for a Shorty Award in #NoPants because #NoPants is life!”
“I nominate @BadAstronomer for a Shorty Award in #science because he always brings us such interesting and amazing info.”
“I nominate @RSPCA for a Shorty Award in #charity because of the awesome work they do for animals.”
“I nominate @GeorgeHrab for a Shorty Award in #entertainment because of his awesome podcast, music and comedy stylings.”
“I nominate @jref for a Shorty Award in #Education because of their promotion of reason in schooling.”
“I nominate @nocompulsoryvac for a Shorty Award in #Quacks because of her tireless effort to spread lies about vaccines.”

And of course @PZMyers for every single category, because that’s kinda traditional isn’t it?

I’ll deviate a little from the recommendations. DrRachie won it last year: I think @RhysMorgan ought to win in the #health category this year.

Nice suck-up in that last line, too.