Tom O’Neil has the goods on the new and improved Emmy voting process. (How does he do it? Scoop after scoop after scoop…) After Lost lost, the TV Academy knew something was amiss and came up with a plan:

This summer the nominees for best acting and series will be determined by a 50/50 mix of the popular vote of TV academy members plus the scores of judging panels which evaluate sample episodes submitted by the top 10 vote-getters in each category.

One of the problems in the past is that the judges didn’t view sample episodes of everything nominated in one category. This year, panel participants must watch all 10 episodes submitted per category and then rank them. And there’s math involved, too.

Jeeze-louise, this is complicated. People’s Choice Awards, anyone?