The 2023 Hugo Fraud and Where We Go From Here
Posted on February 15, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 218 Comments
There’s an investigative report out on the administration of the 2023 Hugo Awards, by Chris Barkley and Jason Sanford, and make no mistake about it, it is grim. The short version is that eligible people and works were kept off the Hugo ballot, not because the Chinese government or the Chinese principals of the Chengdu Worldcon overtly demanded it, but because American and Canadian Hugo administrators made the censorship decisions themselves, often on grounds that were (to put it politely) misinformed. People and works who should have been finalists were denied their rightful place on the ballot. A fraud was perpetrated by the Hugo administrators: on the Hugo Award voters, on the Chengdu Worldcon membership, and on the science fiction and fantasy community at large.
And as a final kick in the teeth, that fraud? Really fucking badly done. It’s a farce, as well as a fraud.
I would like to believe that this is a one-off failure of administration brought on by the circumstances of this year’s Worldcon location, but inasmuch as Dave McCarty, the principal mover of this fraud (and, for the record, someone who I’d considered a friend for more than a decade) was involved in Hugo administration for several other Worldcons, we at least have to check in again on those results. The good news here is that prior to the 2023 Worldcon, the data and stats for the nominations and voting on the awards were made immediately available after the award ceremony, and any discrepancies would have been found and hopefully addressed. We have the power of community examination and vetting for all of those results, and for correcting any problems while that year’s Worldcon was still in operation.
We didn’t have that in 2023. The data and stats were released as late as possible, far after the closure of the Chengdu Worldcon, which meant, due to the highly idiosyncratic nature of the Worldcon structure, there would have been no substantial way to address these discrepancies after the fact. It’s pretty clear to me now that this strategy of delay was intentional, not to address any difficulty in compiling the data, but to evade responsibility for censorship and for perpetrating a fraud. And that, also, is an act of fraud. Who was responsible for releasing the Hugo voting and nomination stats and data? Again: Dave McCarty.
It’s not only on Dave McCarty, to be clear. Everyone involved in the removal of legitimate finalists from their place on the ballot is implicated, and, at the very least, they should have nothing to do with the administration of the Hugo Awards moving forward. Their actions regarding this year’s Hugo Award administration are appalling, embarrassing and shameful. They abdicated their duty as administrators. So they should not be administrators ever again.
There should be apologies: To the people who were wrongfully removed from the ballot, and to the people who were winners and finalists in 2023. The former did not have their deserved and rightful opportunity to be finalists and to compete for the Hugo award; the latter effectively now have asterisks on their achievements. None of them bear any blame for this, of course, and none of their works were not deserving of a spotlight or an eventual award. They are all injured parties to a greater or lesser extent. But we all know what we know now. It’s difficult to feel good about winning, or being a finalist, in a year when you now know a fix was in. Hugo voters should be apologized to as well; they were obliged to vote on a compromised ballot.
That said: Who will give the apologies? The Chengdu Worldcon no longer functionally exists; the Glasgow Worldcon is a legally separate entity that bears no responsibility for the actions undertaken by the 2023 Hugo administrators. Dave McCarty has apologized for being a jerk for those who questioned his administration of the awards but not, importantly, for how he administered the awards themselves. By his words and actions, he apparently believes that he did nothing wrong here. It’s doubtful any apology is coming out of that quarter. Others involved have apologized, which is good. But again, at this point in time, it’s too late to do much about the 2023 Hugo Awards. They’re in the books.
The 2023 Hugo Awards were fraudulent. Now it’s the responsibility of World Science Fiction Society, who owns the trademarks on the Hugos and Worldcon, and all future Worldcons, starting with Glasgow this year and Seattle in 2025, to make sure that this fraud never happens again. WSFS in particular needs to grow the hell up and get some teeth, and become an organization with the actual ability to enforce a standard of accountability with regard to how their trademarks are used and administered on a yearly basis. Part of that must be a contractual agreement on the part of any potential Worldcon for transparency and openness when it comes to the Hugo Award nominations and voting — and a guarantee that any discrepancies, accidental or intentional, are addressed before the close of the Worldcon, if the current relationship between WSFS and the annual Worldcon continues, or by some other mechanism, if changes are made.
Given the actions of the 2023 Hugo administrators, there should also be a ban on the administrators censoring work for political reasons. If the government of wherever the Worldcon is that year demands censorship of the Hugo finalists, then make that government fucking do it. (And then resign in protest.) The administrators should not be willing accomplices in the act of censorship. It goes against everything the Hugos, and any serious literary award, should be about.
To the credit of the 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow, it has already committed to openness with regard to this year’s Hugo nomination process, and will share, when the finalist slate is announced, the information about what works might have been deemed ineligible and why (Update: It has also accepted the resignation of Kat Jones as Hugo administrator). I can’t imagine that the 2025 Worldcon in Seattle will do any different. These are good steps and the right steps to take, but they cannot be the only steps. Real and substantive structural change has to happen. This report shows why: Because if it is not made, then any other future Hugo administrators can do what these administrators here have done. We make rules in the aftermath of violation. To not do so invites future violation.
I’ll end on a personal note here. I made my first Hugo finalist list in 2006. It had a huge impact in my visibility in the science fiction and fantasy world and on the course of my career. The first time I won a Hugo Award, in 2008, I was delighted, but more importantly I felt the community of science fiction fans sharing my joy at holding that trophy. In 2012, I was the emcee for the Hugo Awards, and as gratifying as it is to win one, it is equally gratifying to give them away to writers and artists and editors and fans. My Hugos mean something to me. They mean something to lives and careers of the people who win them. The Hugos mean something to the community.
People are always in a rush to declare the Hugos “over” or irrelevant, especially when people go out of their way to damage them or their reputation. We’ve seen it before in just the last decade, when bad actors tried to destroy the value of the award from the outside, out of petulance and spite; we’re seeing it now, when bad actors have diminished the value of the award from the inside, out of arrogance and incompetence. What keeps the Hugos relevant is the choice of people who love and value science fiction and fantasy to make it so. And that means making sure the Hugos are robust and resilient, and up to the times. Not just in who and what gets nominated and becomes a finalist, but in how they are administered, and how they move through the culture of science fiction and the world.
We’ve hit a very bad moment with the Hugos. What happens next decides whether this is a one-time event, or something that continues to diminish the Hugos as we move forward. I’m optimistic; this community has risen to the challenge before and met it. I think it’ll do so again. Not only because it has to — because it fucking well has to — but because it wants to. And when it does, the Hugo Awards will be better for it, and so will the community and genres it celebrates.
— JS
Note: Attempts to re-litigate the Sad Puppy nonsense in the comments here will be Malleted. That was its own mess, with its own dynamic. This is a new problem, and some think possibly a worse problem, and this is what we’ll be addressing today, thanks.
The good thing to come out of this is that Hugo awards will now be far more transparent – nobody will want to be tarred with the same brush as the 2023 committee. Even a hint at censorship will have people screaming, so future committees will go out of their way to ensure that everything is above board.
Looking at the data when it was published, I couldn’t make the math math and considered there might be some reason or issue that I couldn’t see, perhaps even simple human error.
As the situation evolved, my cynical thought was, “Oh, the Chinese government has stepped in and censored the awards – that’s awful, and we should work out how to build protections into the system to prevent that..”
But to discover that the action to defraud Hugo finalists was taken voluntarily by folks whose job is to maintain the integrity of the awards is beyond the pale. Action needs to be taken to ensure an impartial and external audit and verification of results, or to sever the relationship between the event and the awards, or both.
I’m just looking forward to the cutaway shot of three dudes from Price Waterhouse carrying briefcases during the awards ceremony.
Good parsing as always, John.
Also, historian Timothy Snyder’s first rule on resisting authoritarianism:
“1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.”
https://www.openculture.com/2017/01/20-lessons-from-the-20th-century-about-how-to-defend-democracies-from-authoritarianism.html
It’s not feasible to have a redo of the 2023 vote. But we can lessen the damage to the excluded works by declaring them eligible to be nominated in a later year. It might be too late for 2024 as the nominations are already in progress.
Kat Jones, whose involvement in this debacle is detailed in the report, along with her apparent belief that leaking the e-mails is a worse offense than her own shameful behavior, is, unless I’ve missed something this morning, still the Hugo Administrator for Glasgow 2024. She needs to either resign or be removed as soon as possible.
John Appel:
She’s resigned and I updated the piece with an announcement by the Glasgow Worldcon with news to that effect.
This made the 1440 Newsletter some weeks ago. I’m hoping the works that should have been eligible will be allowed to be on the ballot for Glasgow.
In addition to mandating full transparency going forward, making the banned authors eligible in a later year, and removing anyone who took part in the Chengdu censorship … there should be specific standards for future countries wanting to host Worldcon.
I know very well that software transparency is only part of the story, but as I am the one writing the Hugo nomination and voting software for the next 2-3 Worldcons, I want to say that at least from that side it’ll be as transparent as possible. I want people to be able to trust the code that does this, as a part of being able to trust the process.
Thank you, Chris!
The chair of Glasgow, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, put out a statement which was sent to members of Glasgow (I received it within this past hour) and is posted on their website, which says in part:
“Kat Jones has resigned with immediate effect as Hugo Administrator from Glasgow 2024 and has been removed from the Glasgow 2024 team across all mediums.”
Her name no longer appears on the committee list on the website.
I must admit when Chengdu was picked for the WorldCon my immediate reaction was “I have a bad feeling about this,” but the reality has turned out even worse than my fears.
Clearly there need to be major structural reforms.
The whole thing is discouraging. But the people now suddenly who want to get rid of the Hugo Awards (or hope they die because of this) are even more discouraging.
This reminds me of Hollywood executives who would pull certain things from movies because they wanted the movie to do well in China. (Another word for this is “pandering.”) This wound up backfiring.
@Shirley Dulcey
I’ve seen several people insist that it’s not possible to have a re-do of the 2024 vote, but I have yet to be convinced.
Section 2.6 of the WSFS constitution would allow Glasgow to declare that Chengdu was unable to carry out its duties in an appropriate manor. A vote to ratify at Glasgow and then Seattle runs the 2023 and 2025 Hugos.
I think most people saying it’s not feasible mean that it would be very socially awkward. That it would require upsetting a number of people. That we would no longer be able to pretend that it was a minor tiff between friends. That people’s reputations would suffer perminent consequences.
Anne Marble:
As noted, people huff and puff about the Hugos and their relevance all the time. But the community at large wants to keep them, so I expect these issues will be addressed.
“We make rules in the aftermath of violation. To not do so invites future violation.”
As it happens, this is also a strong argument supporting the application of the 14th Amendment in our current political situation!
fancycwabs – It might/could come to that.
A couple of commenters at File770 suggested creating a permanent committee to oversee WorldCon, the Hugos, or both. They mentioned the IOC, which led to other commenters (including me) to point out the IOC is one of the most corrupt organizations on the planet, and therefore NOT the model we want.
Seems like whatever reconstituted WSFS and Hugo administration arises from the ashes of this debacle must also make a sincere apology to the Chinese fandom, Chengdu Worldcon committee, and probably even the Chinese government for the actions that these bozos took.
I don’t think extending eligibility for the works passed over is fair to this years authors. We don’t know what the votes would have been and an urge to right wrongs shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow this year’s works. However, there should be some sort of official recognition of the works wrongly ruled ineligible.
Thanks John.
Coming from a field that suffers from a lot of fraud…I mean a LOT of fraud, in a way that it is hard to avoid being party to, and that has suppressed even an active whisper network and has no good reporting mechanisms…may I say just how refreshing it is to see the widespread outcry in public forums, the widespread condemnation, people stepping forward with data?
Whatever happened here, it was bad. But how reassuring it must be to look around at the vast majority of your community members, and know that they share your rage, they are not shamed from expressing it, and they and will have your back as best as they can.
There’s a reason organizations hire people like accounting firms to do the collection and oversight of things like this – independent parties ensuring fairness. That wouldn’t be a bad thing for the WSFS and the Hugos.
also, hopefully one fallout will NOT be the return of the sad-puppies, pointing at this and claiming this sort of this is what’s happened in the past to their favorites.
Glasgow 2024 have also put out a list of steps toward transparency (same link as Kat Jones’ resignation above). There is one omission that seems concerning to me as someone newly interested in the Hugo voting process. There is no obvious mechanism to appeal disqualification. Glasgow 2024 commit to publishing the reasons for disqualifications as soon as the final ballot is released, which is a step in the right direction. But at that point, it seems too late to correct errors, whether due to malfeasance or mistake. There is already a requirement that the awards committee attempt to contact nominees to see if they wish to decline, but it seems that there should likewise be an attempt to contact disqualified creators to see if they wish to contest that ruling. For example, they might clarify the date of publication or word count/running length if those are in question.
Between this fraud and sad puppies a few years ago, how can one not look a bit askance at a Hugo, as much as that pains me to write. I also can’t help but wonder what all of the people who paid their dollars (or whatever currency) for their vote will feel about having that money defrauded. One wonders whether a class action is in the offing.
“The short version is that eligible people and works were kept off the Hugo ballot, not because the Chinese government or the Chinese principals of the Chengdu Worldcon overtly demanded it, but because American and Canadian Hugo administrators made the censorship decisions themselves…”
Seems to me that it’s way too early to conclude that McCarty coooked this up all by himself and that the pervasive censorship regime in China didn’t play any role.
We don’t know who gave that “guidance” to McCarty. We don’t know what other pressure was applied and to whom. If it wasn’t in emails to Diane Lacey, we just don’t know about it.
It’s survivorship bias to look at the data we’ve got and assume that it tells the entire story.
I regret not only that the winners can no longer trust that they legitimately won, or that those disqualified were kicked out so capriciously, so that neither winners nor losers can trust in the results, but that so many Chinese fans, excited to host, had their experience poisoned in such a manner. And that it was done voluntarily, by leaders who by their email exchanges seemed eager to try out censorship for a day, like they were tourists cosplaying dictators instead of principled adjudicators. I still have faith in the Hugos, but only because I believe that we will see a significant correction and transparency in the future. Sunlight is the best disinfectant for rot like this, and nobody will be willing to trust the Hugos without it in the future.
@John Scalzi and @Mark W. Richards – thanks for that update.
Is the takeaway here that fraud was found because, unlike earlier years, the Hugo awards were analysed more closely because the Worldcon was in China? How deeply ironic, of so.
Well written John.
There’s no going back and undoing the past. A vote captures a moment in time: we can guess what the results might have been at that moment if the fraud hadn’t occurred, but there’s no way to say for certain.
Bringing those works that were fraudulently removed from the ballot forward and putting them on the current (or a future) ballot might actually extend and prolong the damage that this fraud has created. Would it be fair to those future works to have to compete with authors who might be riding a wellspring of sympathy? Might it create controversy among some who lose out to them?
There are no good answers to this.
The big lesson in all this for me is when I see people saying, “I would have resigned/gone public” if approached with the request to compile dossiers etc.
Would you? Would you really? Because the people who acquiesced, the people who collaborated and did the work are a lot more like you than you think. Diane Lacey said she knew it was wrong and did it anyway because she cared about the Hugos and trusted the people around her like Dave McCarty to make better decisions.
Much like people who claim they would never break under torture (yes you absolutely would that’s why people do it, bc it works), I hope people really look inward and instead of just assuming they would have the courage to resign and go public and put it all on the line, to really interrogate how easy it is to become an accomplice, enabler, and collaborator before you even realize what you’re doing. These aren’t dastardly villains, they are normal people just like you and me. Any one of us could be the next Diane Lacey. I hope that’s not true, but man it’s hard. It doesn’t take much for an otherwise good person with real values to become the next Diane.
DHMCarver:
I mean, if you’re looking for an excuse to look askance at the Hugos, then these will do. On the other hand, when the Puppies nonsense happened, the community adapted to make that shit harder to do. Likewise, the immediate result of this nonsense has been a recommitment to transparency and openness, and I personally expect some substantive changes will follow.
Which is to say, you can look at the problems, or you can look at how, and how quickly, the problems are addressed so those specific problems don’t happen again. With the latter, the Hugos are in decent shape.
I don’t think the proposals to have 2023 excludees included on this year’s ballots are a good idea. As much as it sucked for those people in 2023, and put asterisks on the names of the winners, and as tempting as it is to try and be nice and “fair” over it, I think all it would really achieve is putting asterisks on the names of this year’s winners too. Whoever wins then would be “did they win fairly, or were they benefiting from sympathy/revenge voting from 2023”. I don’t see adding more asterisks and more acrimony to the proposals increasing fairness or trust in the system.
Let this year go ahead as normal, and work hard to ensure all future events never have to go through this again. That is the best way out of this mess. Putting the thumb on scales at the expense of this year’s group of creators is not the way to do that.
Kristina, the results were not scrutinized because they came from China. The initial scrutiny came from the formal report, released on the last possible day, of the Hugo nomination votes. This report included multiple people who were disqualified for no given reason, as well as obviously (to at least one mathy person) forged numbers.
While I think the desire to re-do the 2023 Hugos comes from a good place, the group of fans and writers who were most screwed over by the 2023 Worldcon committee were the ones based in China. I don’t want to minimise the harm done more generally (eg I had a secret dossier on my views on China complied by a Hugo committee & I’m still WTF-F-Fing about that) but it looks like ballots were removed, and Chinese nominees replaced with Western ones and things in general skewed towards English language works in many categories.
A true do-over of 2023 would need to include Chinese finalists and Chinese fans.
“This is a new problem, and some think possibly a worse problem, …”
It is. The puppies themselves got malleted, and the Hugos proved to be able to weather such storms.
But… however much the WSFS and the Hugos do to prevent something like this happening again, there’s really nothing to be done to fix the 2023 Hugos. If you allow all the improperly disallowed works to be entered in the 2024 Hugos, that adds unfair competition to those who SHOULD have been competing this year.
The idea of re-running the 2023 Hugos in 2025 has something going for it — but all those Chengdu attendees MUST be given a vote, if so (and if at all possible, those who weren’t members in 2023 should NOT get a vote), and it still feels a little unfair to those who did win in 2023. While their wins are tainted, there’ll also be a bounce effect giving votes to those who were originally disqualified just because they were disqualified.
We can’t do anything about the results. It’s like the Black Sox scandal in baseball – Cincinnati is still the official 1919 winner even though eight members of the Chicago White Sox were involved in throwing games.
What we can do is make sure those involved, like the Chicago players, never have any official positions in fandom again. And I don’t care how much SMOFfy SMOFs they are. Get them out and keep them out.
I know there’s some talk of decoupling the Hugos from Worldcon, do we have any idea would that would look like moving forward and ho the Hugos would then be awarded?
My understanding is that the talk is less about having the Hugos somewhere other than the Worldcon, than it is making sure the Hugos are run by a consistent standard independent of location.
This is so, so depressing. I wonder if
1) it’s time to standardize across cons and have an outside accounting firm take care of this (like the Oscars)?
2) Are the 2023 Hugo administrators potentially liable for civil fraud? Not a lawyer, but that’s an action that those who won and those who were excluded might be able to consider. If there’s a financial penalty these folks have to pay (or even if they just have to deal with the inconvenience of a lawsuit) it might deter future bad actors.
Decouple the Hugos from the convention. Have the WSFS run all future Hugos, and just have the con host the awards and post the information on the con site. They do not need to run the voting part of things. WSFS should do it from now on.
“The good thing to come out of this is that Hugo awards will now be far more transparent – nobody will want to be tarred with the same brush as the 2023 committee.”
This is the wrong lesson to take from all this. The people who corrupted the Hugos were longtime respected volunteers. Dave McCarty has been involved in running the Hugos many times.
Even after the manipulation of the 2023 Hugos came to light last month, Kat Jones stayed on as the Glasgow Hugo Awards administrator. We didn’t know Jones researched nominees for Chengdu to help justify their exclusion on political grounds, but she did. If Jason Sanford and Chris Barkley had not published their story, one of the people who helped corrupt the last awards was going to run the next.
The Hugo Awards will only become trustworthy and reliable again if we enact changes to assure it. We can’t just count on people in charge to fear bad PR.
This news as been appalling and really depressing.
I have been a Hugo administrator four times, two of those times with my wife Ruth Sachter as the other administrator.
All those times, we have tried to be as fair and transparent as possible, even when dealing with the Sad Puppies in 2015. The very few times that we’ve had to disqualify a nominee, there’s been a statement of exactly why this action had to be taken.
The actions in 2023 destroy all the integrity that we, and many other administrators, worked hard to maintain.
I’m at a loss for words…
Considering everything in the File770 report, and the brief commentary here, the take-away is, ” What was supposed to be their reward, their benefit?”
It particularly infuriates me that Babel was taken off — unread even! It was one of the few spec fiction novels I’ve been able to read in years, and moreover, I read it non-stop until I finished it, in all the opportunities I had to read.
“It is worse than a crime; it’s a blunder.”
Cowardice is I think quite an understandable phenomenon – I’ve worked in an administrative capacity – but from the information in the current report, the stupidity seems remarkable. Cowardice combined with recklessness is not a good strategy.
One gets the impression there was no one with any relevant legal background consulted, and some amateurs with very definite ideas accustomed to running things.
A stress test was failed. I’m not sure what this really tells us about the process but now it will have to be addressed.
Anyway, I am absorbed in my last-minute reading for the current nomination cycle and entirely optimistic about the future of this fan award. Though the explosive success of the genre does seem to call for a greater degree of professionalism than was relevant at the outset.
@glc, as an attorney (not your attorney, probably not even licensed in your jurisdiction) you’d be surprised how many of my clients want to talk to me about legal strategy and come up with the most off the wall plans that would get me disbarred faster than Usian Bolt in the 100m. Amateurs with definite ideas can sometimes be a menace to society.
I think that either rerunning the 2023 Hugos in their entirety or making the excluded items eligible in future years is a bad idea. Because of the sympathy angle, the excluded items would have a decided advantage and would likely win over any competition.
To me, if the entire 2023 awards were rerun, this would further damage the 2023 awards, and those who were awarded their Hugos, If instead, the excluded items were placed on a future ballot and won, it would call those results into question, with people wondering whether the excluded items were the best, or only won because of the past injustice. While the excluded creators are certainly owed an apology, I think that offering any type of redo would lead to more problems.
The Chengdu chairs — notably, Ben Yalow — can apologize. I’m not sure that releasing the info during the con would change much. What would happen? It’s not like you can instantly rerun the Hugos.
Regarding the question of who benefits, before Chengdu won the site selection vote to host a Worldcon, a bunch of WSFS notables received a free trip to China — including Dave McCarty.
https://file770.com/pixel-scroll-11-21-19-because-the-scroll-belongs-to-pixels/
A lot of money was being thrown around to get a Worldcon, host it in a monumental new building project and make it successful. During the event over $1 billion in business deals were announced by Chinese entities.
The motive for corrupting the awards could be depressingly simple. If you’re getting junkets and other perks from being one of the Westerners helping to lead it, you might want to go the extra mile to keep those SMOF benefits coming your way.
This whole thing reeks of Dave McCarty cosplaying as an international diplomat who thought he knew how the world works better than anyone else because of a massive ego and a few trips to China.
I was in a bookstore not too long ago that devoted an endcap and a small table to past and present ‘Hugo Winners.’
There’s no replacing the prestige and lost sales that come with that. Some were quite likely robbed of their rightful place on that display.
But there’s zero that can be done about it now w/o affecting future writers who may earn a place on that display.
I saw this link on File 770 – https://www.exurbe.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/ In this post, Dr. Palmer, talks about how “The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power.”
Blaming Dave McCartney* is not looking at the bigger picture – in that he’s a single person, and would have to stand up against the 8 billion pound gorilla in the room, aka the CCP.
Just look at what happened with John Cena, or Snickers, or Delta…
(*Not an apologist for Dave McCartney. He should have been far more transparent.)
And the same for site selection voting!
Whoever put pressure in (or accepted dossiers from, or whatever) the Hugo voting admins could have filed a “Chengdu 2 in 2025” bid. They didn’t, but if they’d wanted to, they could have.
The site selection votes would certainly look different in that hypothetical case. (Since Seattle would not have been running unopposed.) But we’d be looking at them just as distrustfully. Only with less evidence, since we’d only have totals to review, rather than an STV/EPH audit trail. And the question of ballot-box stuffing will remain open no matter who is in charge.
As far as I can tell, “organized” SF fandom curated these awards for many years, with minimal issues/problems arising therefrom. As an “unorganized” (also disorganized, but that’s not relevant) SF fan, the Hugos list is always helpful to me when I’m looking for new items to load on the e-book, but I don’t have a stake in the curation.
So, speaking as an ‘outsider’, here’s what I’m seeing:
1) After many years of reasonably effective curation, with the occasional bobble here and there (:koff: puppies :koff:), a fairly obvious failure of curation happened.
2) Organized fandom NOTICED! The failure was called out. Investigations are happening. Some responsibility has been accepted. Some consequences have already been experienced.
3) Information about the failure is flowing freely in organized fandom, and discussion is ongoing. Solutions to prevent future failures, and possibly redress the harm already done, are being mooted.
4) Some, at least, of the “official” entities connected with the curation are attending to the flowing information, and participating in the ongoing discussions.
5) The whole process is a work in progress, and there will be More To Come, but because Organized SF fandom is vast, diverse, creative, opinionated, and (heh-heh) not THAT well organized (it’s a GOOD thing, people!), this process will take quite a while.
What this says to me, outsider and unofficial SF fan, is “Hey, it’s a non-professional but carefully scrutinized and highly-invested system, and it’s actually WORKING! The way such systems are supposed to work!”
You set up a system with as few rules and restrictions as possible, to be functional. It functions fine until something exposes a vulnerability you didn’t anticipate. So you analyze, you discuss, you create working hypotheses around possible solutions, and eventually you’ll pilot some.
You’ll see what the minimal level of additional rules and restrictions should be to prevent recurrence around the exposed vulnerability (and possibly related vulnerabilities that weren’t exploited but are now apparent as potentially exploitable. Don’t go overboard on that, though.)
And more Hugos will be awarded, and there will be much rejoicing among SF fandom, organized and unorganized.
Because, as case studies in systems failure analysis go, this one is in the category of ‘primary cultural/emotional risk and secondary economic risk’. Risk of loss of life, major economic disruption, and destruction of infrastructure (the kind human lives depend on, like power, supply chain, etc.) do not apply here.
So while the stakes are very high, from the standpoint of this community’s trust, emotional attachment, and some economic consequences (what does a Hugo nomination/award add to a book’s sales, and/or publisher’s/author’s revenues?) it’s correctly calibrated at “a community problem that can be solved by the community, using available community resources.”
That’s how it’s playing out, anyway, and how I hope it continues to play out. I like the Hugo lists, they’re useful to me.
Thank you for the thorough explanation. Censorship is always sad.
I’m curious about something, John. Why not just refuse to have the Hugo Awards in any country that wants to censor them?
I’m not a writer (at least not yet) and there is probably a lot I don’t understand here, but I thought it was worth asking.
I would go a step further, and say that anyone involved in perpetrating this not be given any position of responsibility in any future Worldcon.
“Why not just refuse to have the Hugo Awards in any country that wants to censor them?”
One of the arguments for setting up a permanent WSFS committee that runs the Hugos, and does not answer to that year’s Worldcon, is that any site seeking to host a Worldcon would know they have no control over what gets nominated or wins the award.
So if that situation raised problems for them, they could address that by not seeking a Worldcon at all.
This is what you get when you make deals with tyrants. Is there a way to keep one-party totalitarian states from gaming the Worldcon system in the future? There should be. Self-back-patting about “now it truly is a WORLD convention” isn’t worth sacrificing integrity and conscience.
@Shannon
“Why not just refuse to have the Hugo Awards in any country that wants to censor them?”
From the article referenced, it is unclear if the CCP actively censored the Chengdu Hugo’s or if it was entirely an act of self-censorship from the admins. While your idea seems good, it isn’t practical or easy to implement. Things like censorship are rarely discussed openly so how do you decide to disqualify a bid on that basis? Bidders are unlikely to come out and say “We reserve the right to censor Hugo winners if you go with us.”
Certainly people had reservations about China but reservations are hard to create a fair policy around.
It is clear that there needs to be quite comprehensive reform of how the WSFS is run for any proper reform of the Hugo Awards is possible.
To do that the WSFS Business Meeting needs to die, and the people who usually go to the BM are unlikely to do that if left on their own.
So, I call on the Glasgow and Seattle Worldcons to fascilitate wide participation in the BM by not counterprogramming the BM at all.
That way resolutions killing the BM, and giving the wider community a chance to participate, will have a better chance to pass.
My suggestions for reform:
1) Make WSFS a proper organisation totally independent of Worldcon, with a yearly membership fee(, which could include Hugo voting rights).
2) Make a permanent WSFS online forum for discussions regarding WSFS.
This should be possible to view by anyone, but posting rights should be restricted to current WSFS members.
(I think people thinking about joining should be able to see how the organisation functions before putting money in to participate.)
3) Voting on any WSFS business should be done online. Either as part of Hugo voting(, if Hugo voting is included in WSFS membership), or at a set time each year.
4) The WSFS forum should include a mechanism where X number of members can call for an early vote on important subjects.
For the people wondering “Why not make the excluded ’23 works eligible in ’24 or ’25 or ’26?” you are not thinking this through.
How could a work from a later year have a fair shot at the award, if it has to compete with this one that was already marked out as having been wronged? Simply putting these wronged works on a later ballot gives them a leg up on everyone who would otherwise have been eligible.
Sometimes when a thing is broken, there is no way to fix it. The 2023 Hugos are an example of this. There is no way to make it right. Trying to compensate will just mean you are doing undeserved harm to somebody else.
I think the real test here is what redress is made available to those who were improperly excluded. I don’t know if that’s some sort of rerun or somehow having a 2023 retro Hugos in 2025 or something else. I say this fully aware that such redress will be excruciating for those who won at Chengdu, but it’s necessary. Those wins are already tainted. To the extent the WSFS, etc. are unwilling and unable to right the wrongs here should the Hugos continue to exist?
Laertes’ point sticks with me. Dave McCarty seems to have made the eligibility determinations, but it does not follow that the “red flag” research project was his idea. We only know what’s in the Lacey emails. We don’t know what prompted McCarty to give those instructions to Jones, Lacey and others, or why he excluded Chinese administrators from this process.
Likewise, the Barkley/Sanford report does not address the reported ballot-counting problems, such as Babel not receiving any additional votes in successive ranked-choice rounds. The authors had a good reason for not doing so: The absence of any relevant documentary sources or interview subjects. Still, the report underlines that key subjects not covered by email correspondence remain obscure.
Speaking personally, as one of the recipients of the 2023 Hugo Awards, I see my trophy as, at worse, as a curiosity and at best, a valued family heirloom.
I plan on passing my Hugo on to my daughter and eventually, my granddaughter.
And WHO KNOWS, in a couple of decades, it will be shown on Antiques Roadshow and be valued at some significant sum, becoming a point of family pride.
(Unless they sell it. Then they will FEEL MY VENGEANCE FROM THE GRAVE!!!!! Just Saying…)
Chris M. Barkley
Thank you for speaking out. I read the very grim and insightful report last night with a heavy heart. I sincerely hope the WSFS can address this going forward, because my fear is now what happens if the Worldcon is held in Florida, Texas, Missouri, or any other state working to strip rights from groups of individuals? My biggest worry is that this will be seen in isolation as unique to the Chinese Worldcon. Some may call me alarmist or insist that it’s an isolated issue, but we also must also strengthen our institutions and educate ourselves so that it doesn’t happen again.
Are other awards such as the Nebulas also vulnerable to this sort of manipulation, or is this uniquely an artifact of WorldCon’s operation?
Tod Weitzel:
The Nebs are run by SFWA, which has an entirely different organizational structure. It’s not liable to manipulation in this same way.
I also think we should pay more attention to what Laertes said. The emails don’t tell the whole story. I’m not an apologist for Dave M. I think what he did was reprehensible. But, it is still not clear to me whether he initiated it on his own or whether there were some pressures on him that made him concerned about the well-being of the Chinese fans or gave him other reasons to make the choice he did.
To the extent the WSFS, etc. are unwilling and unable to right the wrongs here should the Hugos continue to exist?
Signs point to YES.
A few items.
The report indicates that some “Chinese businessmen” may have been involved in running the con, in place of local fans. I have a friend that does business in China, having goods made in local factories. Every business of any size in China has an on-site cadre of Party members, there to be sure the Party interests are upheld, and on the business payroll. Smaller businesses have a local Party representative that comes around on a regular basis to review things. (And get paid.) It would be reasonable to assume that any high profile international event would have some party oversight, either embedded in the Chengdu committee or via the “businessmen”.
Second, the text of the report seems to indicate that the dossiers that were compiled in the US were handed off to the Chinese members of the committee for review. It’s not clear who made the final call of ineligibility, but it is implied that it was made in China. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
What to do? IDK. Separation of the awards is a big step, but might be needed.
I very much doubt that the people on the committee declared things ineligible on their own, without explanation. It was almost certainly the case that they were pressured by people in China, perhaps at the level of “eliminate those books or we cancel the convention, or bar you from the country and hold the convention without you”. We may never know the truth.
“Why not just refuse to have the Hugo Awards in any country that wants to censor them?”
Countries that would want to censor the Hugos would not announce this ahead of time. They might not even plan to ahead of time.
And then, as here,* they would not admit it after the fact.
This proposed solution is not altogether dissimilar from “Why don’t you just not date serial killers?”
*we do not know, of course, if China had any input into the censorship that happened here. And even if we did, we did not know it ahead of time.
All of this has come to light because Chengdu did eventually release the voting, nominations, and long-list stats. But, to use a phrase that may be familiar to Whatever readers, what if they just … didn’t?
What’s the WSFS gonna do?
To speak to some of the things that historianess raised in her comment, when the stats first came out and there was an initial flurry of commentary from people on the Mark Protection Committee — almost the only bit of WSFS that is both ongoing and legally chartered — that left the trademark lawyers among the readership flabbergasted. Possibly incredulous. Definitely agog.
Legal terms of art like “abandonment of trademark” and “naked license” (apparently not nearly as fun as it might sound) were bandied about. Because WSFS in an unincorporated society, the phrase “unlimited personal liability” entered the chat. Soon after that, the MPC people who had been talking seem to have gotten good lawyerly advice and stopped talking.
As Scalzi said, it’s time for WSFS to “grow the hell up and get some teeth, and become an organization with the actual ability to enforce a standard of accountability with regard to how their trademarks are used and administered on a yearly basis.” Because if it doesn’t, the next time there’s shenanigans that releasing the stats would reveal, the people doing the shenaning will likely think, well what if we just … didn’t?
Shirley Dulcey, et al:
And yet the evidence we have strongly suggests they self-censored without specific instruction, and Dave McCarty (for what his own assertions are worth at this point) has said there was no interference from the Chinese. Also, bluntly, if there was a threat to the operation of the Worldcon on that level of things, there are in fact avenues to address it, so the reaction should have been to walk.
At this point I suspect the simplest explanation is the correct one: Why would the Chinese government (or anyone else) need to censor the Hugo ballot when the North American Hugo administrators were willing to do it themselves? The answer: They wouldn’t. It’s on the Hugo administrators.
Thank you very much for the clear and articulate debrief. It is very much appreciated.
It’s also a cautionary note with regards to voting on the site. If someone plans another Orlando WorldCon, will people have to worry about works by or about LGBTQ+ folks or people of color being declared ineligible due to the oppressive regime currently in place in Florida? Remember, Uganda is a current bid and it’s illegal to be gay there.
Making the works and authors that were unfairly excluded from the ballot be eligible for the ballot in later years probably wouldn’t be fair for works and authors that come out in those later years. But perhaps a partial remedy would be to retroactively declare those works and authors as Hugo nominees for 2023 (if they would have been eligible and would have been selected for the ballot based on their nomination counts had they not been disqualified.)
An author being able to put “Hugo nominee” on the cover of their book likely has at least a bit of a positive impact on their future sales, but it shouldn’t significantly impact the other authors who appeared (or whose work appeared) on the ballot.
While we certainly don’t want to relitigate the (Sad|Angry|Bad) Puppies nonsense, the de jure solution was to implement a much more complicated nominations process, which went by the name “E Pluribus Hugo.” It’s hard enough to explain ranked-choice voting to newbies (or New York City voters), but EPH is simply opaque. I don’t THINK there’s an explicit step involving chicken entrails, but there might as well be. Using it does not improve transparency at all. While the manipulation of the nominations at Chengu was blatant, how much easier would it have been to hide if the administrators had screwed with the EPH calculations instead?
“Dave McCarty (for what his own assertions are worth at this point) has said there was no interference from the Chinese.”
That’s indeed what he said in public after the night soil hit the fan. Barkley and Sanford have revealed that, in private emails with his co-conspirators, contemporaneous to the crime, he spoke of receiving “guidance” about sensitive topics, and proposed to follow up with some locals for more such.
Neither his private nor his public assertions are worth much, of course. But it’s worth noting that he sang a very different tune when he didn’t feel the eyes of the world upon him.
His email exchanges with Lacey Et al. have the tone of a committee chair briefing his reports about his meetings with his own peers and supervisor. As Lacey wouldn’t have been privvy to those conversations, excepting as McCarty related them to her, we have no idea what their substance may have been.
@Berni Phillips
I see this kind thing a lot. While not wanting to minimize the harmfulness of the political people in charge of the State, FL is still a long way from being Uganda. I suggest that as long as gay days are still happening at Orlando, a WorldCon would be safe also.
In terms of redressing the injustice, I could imagine some kind of crowdsourced publicity boost to encourage people to read the works which were unfairly excluded. Kind of a bonus shortlist.
I hope that as a result of this debacle is not only a commitment to transparency but a reconsideration of allowing countries with human rights issues to host the awards. For example, I am curious how they will deal with the fact that the 2028 awards are to be held in Uganda, one of the most notoriously anti-LGBTQ+ countries in the world. You can be sentenced to life imprisonment just for being gay–who’s going to want to chance that? Would a gay author be allowed to win? And if they did, would they show up to accept the award?
I could see, rather than rerunning the Hugos, giving the improperly excluded works some sort of special Hugo status, more than “nominee,” less than “winner,” that could be used in promoting the books.
I might suggest “Hugo Honoree,” except that they were definitely not honored.
There are doubtless problems with this idea, but in its defense I haven’t given it much thought.
“I am curious how they will deal with the fact that the 2028 awards are to be held in Uganda…”
As I understand it, they aren’t “to be held in Uganda.” There is a bid to hold Worldcon there.
The simplest solution would be to get somewhere else to mount a competing bid and vote for that one instead.
Exactly, and it’s not just Orlando. The 2016 Worldcon was in Kansas City, and Missouri has been promoting much the same stuff Florida has been. (Right now our legislature is debating a bill that would make it a CIVIL RIGHTS VIOLATION for any transgender person to use a public restroom that isn’t for their assigned at birth sex. ) I have not been active in fandom pretty much since about 2012, but I can think of several states including Texas, where the Tx library association “disinvited” Chuck Tingle due to his necessary disability accommodation, where the same situation you mention might occur.
For what it’s worth I think the Chinese government got exactly what they wanted. A situation where, by whomever and for whatever reason, their political and free speech (or lack thereof…I can’t imagine anyone could even SAY “Uighur” at the con) preferences were upheld without them having to do a damned thing.
That censorship of themselves, for whatEVER reason is the ne plus ultra of all authoritarian regimes. I think the WSFS should think long and hard (and then reject) calls to locate the Con in authoritarian countries such as Hungary, Turkey, Belorussia, or for pities sake, Russia. Given the predilections of the Indian, and Venezuelan governments they should probably be given the hairy eyeball at a minimum (Brazil would have been on that list until recently as well).
There’s being open minded and inclusive and then there’s being soft headed. To locate a LITERARY gathering in an authoritarian country strikes me as very much the latter.
Like everyone I’m disgusted. I’m glad Glasgow is taking firm steps to distance themselves from this mess. I personally favor a separate Hugo Award committee to be in charge of the award, with members having set terms and a schedule so that each year the oldest serving member steps down and is replaced by a new one. Perhaps appointed by that year’s Worldcon. Just a thought. And if Worldcon is ever hosted in a country where there was undue pressure, they should yank the ceremony from that Worldcon and hold it elsewhere, like the Nasfic or Eurocon.
I also am starting the campaign of Anyone But Mary Robinette Kowal as head of this year’s Hugo administration. Not because I don’t trust her. I find her the epitome of integrity (and a very nice person to boot). But rather, she’s bailed out Worldcon enough and give the poor lady a break :)
“EPH is simply opaque. I don’t THINK there’s an explicit step involving chicken entrails, but there might as well be. Using it does not improve transparency at all. ”
EPH is not opaque. People have undertaken it by hand to confirm the software that implements it is working correctly. EPH provided more transparency at Chengdu.
Even before Jason Sanford and Chris Barkley’s story, the Chengdu Hugo Awards numbers released by Dave McCarty showed serious discrepancies that were evident because EPH was used. It was more difficult to fake, helping to raise another alarm that the Hugo team was up to no good.
Laertes, my spouse, w much more experience of corruption than me, agrees, feels there probably was a back channel.
I wish people who are talking about CCP or Chinese governmental intervention would bear in mind Ada Palmer’s remark in her “Tools for Thinking About Censorship” (which is worth reading in full): “The majority of censorship is self-censorship or middleman-censorship, but the majority of that is deliberately cultivated by an outside power.” The CCP and national Chinese government need not act directly; plenty of people would have done so on their behalf. One Bluesky commentator also points out that “the government” might be local officials worried about repercussions.
As a resident of Florida I would have concerns about the Hugo Awards being manipulated to appease the state government during a Worldcon in the state, particularly in regard to LGBTQ works and nominees.
This is a state where Ron DeSantis and his allies keep looking for new ways to harm the lives of trangender people. It’s also the place where Moms for Liberty was founded and they constantly engage in book bans and harassment of school librarians, teachers and school officials over LGBTQ content.
There is no cruelty too small for them to undertake if there is perceived political gain. Everything they do begins under the premise of protecting children and is extended to control the lives of adults. We have a new crime here punishable by up to a year in jail — being a transgender person who uses a bathroom in a government owned building, public school or university that does not match their “biological sex.”
I want a Worldcon to come to my state, but not this one. I’m hoping to move out of Florida as soon as I can.
I have to admit that I very much hope Uganda’s bid to host a Worldcon is tossed out. many of us fen are LGBTQ+, and I know I certainly would not feel safe in traveling to Uganda (not that I could currently afford to, but in theory). I would really hate to see a country with such an oppressive and hyper-religious regime benefit in any way from hosting a con and the revenue that ensues therefrom.
surely SF is better than that? given how often SF is about freedom, transgression, against authoritarianism, surely we can do better.
The reason I’m banging on about this isn’t just to be tedious. It’s that I worry that the same charitable/naive instincts that led people to believe that a Worldcon in China was a good idea will lead people to conclude that the only thing that went wrong here that some westerners did a racism.
Bunch of people (elsewhere–it’s a much-discussed thing in many media) seem to think that since nobody emailed Diane Lacey a copy of a censorship warrant, this problem can be avoided just by removing McCarty and Jones.
The vast power of China’s censorship system is well-understood and amply documented elsewhere. This is exactly the result we should have expected, and there’s every reason to suppose that the next repressive-country Worldcon will succeed in producing the next Dave McCarty.
I agree with Steve L, I feel the excluded nominees should be able to put Hugo Finalist on their list of accomplishments/on the covers of any re-releases. That’s objectively true and it doesn’t impact the winners or other finalists.
Beyond that, it’s good to hear that the software being used in future is in good hands, and if there is any way of making a clearly identifiable audit trail a requirement of Hugos in the future, that seems sensible.
One thing that hasn’t come up at all is handling of vote and voter information. Preserving the privacy of Hugo voters should also be considered very carefully since that’s another potential point of failure with potentially devastating consequences.
I can imagine a scenario where someone’s vote becoming public affects their lives in a negative way.
@rcade: “EPH is not opaque. People have undertaken it by hand to confirm the software that implements it is working correctly. EPH provided more transparency at Chengdu.”
I’m sure folks have done that calculation by hand. So did Archemides when he figured out a value for pi. So did Katherine Johnson for John Glenn’s flight. It doesn’t speak to the complexity of the calculation. Nor
does it negate my original observation about EPH being obscure.
In the last century Broadway producer David Bellasco used to tell folks pitching a story to him: “If you can’t write your idea on the back of my business card, you don’t have a clear idea.” I can explain counting the final ballot on the back of my business card; EPH takes roughly a full page of the WSFS constitution. I’m willing to bet cash money that your average Hugo voter can explain how the final ballot is tallied, but couldn’t explain the nomination process if I offered them my winnings from that bet.
Laertes:
The problem with banging on about this is that it kinda does give the impression one is trying to excuse/mitigate the bad actions of people directly involved with the problem here. Attend, please, to the fact that not only did they indulge in censorship, they did it poorly, knocking people and works off the ballot that seem likely to have passed muster by the Chinese. Babel is in print in China; Paul Weimer did not visit Tibet (although the eventual Best Novel winner did).
Assigning these incompetent adventures into self-censorship to the Chinese is not required. Certainly the administrators knew China is the not the West. But what they did with that knowledge is on them.
I think the only true redress to this entire fiasco is to rescind all awards presented in 2023. No asterisks. No notes explain the situation. Simply no awards were presented due to fraud.
“Nor does it negate my original observation about EPH being obscure.”
“Opaque” and “obscure” are different words with different meanings.
“In the last century Broadway producer David Bellasco used to tell folks pitching a story to him: ‘If you can’t write your idea on the back of my business card, you don’t have a clear idea.’ I can explain counting the final ballot on the back of my business card; EPH takes roughly a full page of the WSFS constitution.”
I would hazard a guess that people pitching to Bellasco — even if they could write their idea on the back of a business card — did not limit themselves to that when pitching.
Beyond that, a constitutional description of a voting process is not a pitch — that’s kind of like comparing a pitch with a finished manuscript.
I can’t comment on how opaque (or obscure) EPH is, but I can tell that these are bad comparisons.
The fact over a billion US dollars’ worth of contracts were signed at Chengdu is where I stop to look harder. Who profited from winning? Who might’ve profited if their nominees won, assuming they didn’t do a clean sweep? And what would best motivate someone like McCarty to pull the rug out from under an honest award administration process? We can’t determine some of it. The rest deserves a looking-at. Corruption because of fear is possible. Corruption for material gain is far more common. I am not saying that McCarty was paid for this. I can’t. I have no proof. I am saying that if we don’t give a money trail a moment’s thought as we look at the data, we’re ignoring a pattern as old as the hanging gardens of Babylon that’s not even 1% as pretty.
I agree that the 2023 Hugo Awards were irredeemably fraudulent and that the awards do not exist. However, those who were told that they had won fraudulent awards were completely innocent. You can’t rescind the awards due to fraud without explanation. Instead, all awards, nominations, etc. should be canceled and struck from the record with with an extensive explanation that names and shames those responsible for this scandal and makes it clear that the “winners” of invalid awards were innocent victims.
I cannot forgive what was done to R.F. Kuang, and I cannot forgive what was done to Ursula Vernon.
The reports and promises of future good behavior are much too little, much too late.
Those who feel that the Hugos are irrelevant in light of this shameful injustice that is simply not going to be put right are expressing a completely justified and not at all hasty analysis of this scandal.
@Jeff Copeland: Your explanation of why EPH is bad takes up way more space than the back of a business card.
So do most of these comments.
Should we even be reading them?
As a long standing sci-fi reader, but not a hardcore fandom person:
I’d want to see an independent standing committee for the Hugo awards, with an outside accounting firm running the voting process.
Elsewise, when looking at a Hugo Award Winner in a bookstore or online, I’ll just have to assume that they got the award as a favor to a friend or better competition was ‘administratively removed’.
Before all this, I did think the Hugo was awarded by at least a well-run, long-standing single organization that simply hosted a physical convention in different spots.
Now, well. ‘Voted favorite novel by people who live in this one city after we removed all the books we don’t like’ had a much different ring.
Counting Nominations:
It’s a weighted count system known as EPH – your nominations are weighted by the number of your nominations that haven’t been eliminated. Thus initially all my nominations count 0.2 of a vote, and when one goes, the rest count 0.25 and so on.
The nominees are the last 6 standing.
Douglas E. Welch:
Who shall do it, and by what mechanism? The Chengdu Worldcon functionally no longer exists, and the Glasgow Worldcon has no authority to do so, and in any event I’m not aware of a process to rescind Hugo Awards once they are given out.
Again: 2023 is already in the books. We can’t go back. What’s important is what happens moving forward.
This is really nothing new they have been removing people for years they didn’t like or who would upset others. It’s just in years past few cared about those rejected. All Hugos going back a few decades should have asterisks by them. You may disagree but I state the truth of the matter. Not many folks who read sci fi pay any attention to this award. It’s time has passed.
Alex M: Thank you for the humor. It waa greatly appreciated in this time of crisis.
“This is really nothing new they have been removing people for years they didn’t like or who would upset others.”
I don’t know this fantasy of yours came from, but as a multiple-time Hugo administrator, I know that that is completely false.
You all overlooked the part where he said it was the “truth of the matter.” Pretty sure that settles it, now and forever — or at least until 21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, King of England.
Alex M:
“You may disagree but I state the truth of the matter.”
Lol, no you don’t.
“While the manipulation of the nominations at Chengu was blatant, how much easier would it have been to hide if the administrators had screwed with the EPH calculations instead?”
It’s very hard to convincingly screw with the EPH calculations – that’s how we could tell something was wrong over and above the bogus exclusions. In fact, in some circumstances, one person could figure out, by knowing only his nominations and the purported stats, that cheating had occurred.
“You all overlooked the part where he said it was the ‘truth of the matter.’ Pretty sure that settles it, now and forever — or at least until 21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, King of England.”
Or, as we all know, until it’s converted to energy.
To me, the bizarre part of all of that is the implication that they also apparently disqualified a bunch of Chinese nominations on… the grounds that they were slated, if I understand it correctly? Which makes no sense, but is in line with the idea that the Hugo admins were behaving like they were the law here.
That goes a long way toward explaining a very large mystery: Why were the Hugos dominated by Western works in the first place?
The fact that the Hugo nomination list looks like a normal nomination list is, in fact, weird AF.
Western fandom (and especially English-speaking fandom) is so homogenized that we kind of take for granted that, no matter where the Worldcon is located, the Hugo ballot is kind of going to look the same, with us recognizing all of the works on it.
That shouldn’t have happened in Chengdu. There’s a huge amount of homegrown Chinese language SF/fantasy books/TV shows/movies with widespread mass-market appeal that would have qualified for the Hugos.
To explain what I mean: Moon Man is a SF comedy that was the 11th highest-grossing movie in China in 2022. Love Between Fairy and Devil was a fantasy romance streaming show that was one of the most popular shows in 2022. There are some insanely popular Chinese webnovels ongoing in 2022 that would have qualified for Best Series. You’d expect at least 15-20 noms for things like this, which would have made them show up in the nomination long list, but there’s nothing. (This is made all the more strange by the disappearance of the 2000+ Chinese fans who voted in site selection… which, whether or not they actually existed, their Hugo nomination rights certainly did.)
The fact that the Hugo nominations weren’t dominated by homegrown Chinese content is the dog that didn’t bark to me, in terms of being a huge sign that something went wrong in how that nomination list came to be, and all the more puzzling because, well, McCartney and co shouldn’t have needed to fix the nominations. There should have been enough Chinese nominations for homegrown Chinese works (i.e., pre-vetted) that this shouldn’t have been an issue.
I’m not sure people are ready to move forward while the appalling details of the scandal are still coming out.
At the very least the Hugos need to take a sabbatical for several years until the stench of their bad reputation is a little less acute. Maybe over the course of several years a procedure could be put in place for canceling a year’s worth of Hugos if there is sufficient evidence that this is warranted. Or maybe not. What I do know is that trying to continue with business as usual and expecting people to just get over it sends a message about whether this is being taken seriously enough.
I know that Worldcons/WSFS/whoever couldn’t afford Price Waterhouse Cooper, but that level of coverage wouldn’t be necessary. What would it do to the budget of a Worldcon to require them to pay for a small accounting firm to do the tallying and reporting of the Hugo votes? Any accountants out there want to give a rough cost estimate for that kind of service?
If an “official” accountancy firm for the Hugos is hired and it’s in the US or another free-speech-friendly place, censorship in any country won’t be an issue since all the data will be tallied (and disqualifications adjudicated impartially) in the US/Canada/UK or some other non-censorious place. This could also solve the problem of the votes being destroyed after counting so that no clean analysis can be done in case there is suspicion of chicanery. The privacy of the voters could be protected without permanently losing important data.
Also, I see a lot of people wondering about possible harms to LGBT+ fen due to Worldcons being held in places with bigoted local laws, but I’m more concerned about pregnant fen who would like to attend a WorldCon while expecting but are terrified of having serious pregnancy complications while in a US state (or some other country with bad reproductive freedom laws) and being unable to receive lifesaving care due to local laws, and ending up like Savita Halappanavar, Allie Phillips, or Andrea Prudente. This doesn’t affect the Hugo voting but I feel it definitely should be raised when site bids are being considered.
Gretchen Johnson:
“At the very least the Hugos need to take a sabbatical for several years until the stench of their bad reputation is a little less acute.”
Nah. What needs to happen is an immediate repudiation of the practices and policies that allowed this to happen — which as a practical matter is happening in Glasgow right now and is almost certainly going to happen in Seattle. Sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant. The sooner the better, no waiting.
Brian’s point about the Hugo list looking like any other Worldcon’s list is really striking. And it places most of the responsibility on the Hugo committee.
I’m not naive to think there was absolutely no pressure from Chinese government. But it just seems to me that any from the big guys was broad and subtle, anything specific was from local officials trying to CYA and the Hugo committee took all that, turned it up to 13 and added their own special thought of what they thought was wanted.
gwangung: When I say things like that, I get accused of making excuses for Dave McCarty. I wish you better luck than I’ve had.
The discomfort of seeing the US lauded as free-speech friendly in the same post that dismisses LGBTQ+ concerns because pregnant people are more important… as though there isn’t considerable overlap in that group.
Really, I am looking askance at all the people here dismissing LGBTQ+ concerns (extremely real!) as well as the gall of lauding the US as a superior for free speech when the people who did the censoring were based in North America and banning books with LGBTQ+ content is rife there.
Yes, I have had qualms about going to any US-based con before both as someone with a womb and a member of the LGBTQ+ community.
If this incident illustrates anything it’s gotta be that the idea that people from Anglo-European Countries are immune to civil rights concerns is bogus.
Over on Bluesky, this comment:
There’s no realistic way of redoing the awards, especially since we don’t have access to the original list of nominations. The best we can do is retroactively give the impacted artists finalist status.
Sadly, WSFS is designed to move at a glacial pace. There won’t be major rule changes for Glasgow or Seattle, so there will have to be commitments to transparency from the committees. I think that is already happening.
It would help if some new blood is added to the SMOF group, especially if permanent committees and staff are created. However, that requires people who have the time and energy to do it.
Also, SL Huang points out that, in compiling dossiers, the Hugo Committee was working for the Chinese authorities.
She’s absolutely right. This goes beyond the Hugo awards. People are endangered by the misconduct of the Hugo Committee.
Holy Shit
There should be a Hugo Award B for 2023 to be nominated along side Hugo 2024. People who were excluded need to be legitimately considered in a special session. Maybe tge same people will be nominated again but it doesn’t sound like it. Perhaps the Hugo’s should not be voted and awarded in totalitarian countries no matter how hard they lobby for them in some attempt at legitimizing their regime. Would North Korea be considered as a host? Unlikely. The Chinese were not better. A redo is necessary for recognizing writers and works that truly deserve it.
This won’t truly be over until we learn why Dave McCarty did what he did. Did the Chinese government pay him or otherwise incentivize him? Threaten him or the Hugos somehow? I find it difficult to believe that he decided to perpetrate such a blatant fraud all on his own.
Meanwhile, why is no one talking about actually righting this wrong in addition to learning lessons and moving on? The 2023 awards denied censored authors a fair shot at a potentially life- and career-changing award, perhaps the only such shot some of them will ever have. Hugo Awards rules and procedures are malleable and have changed repeatedly and significantly over the decades. Why can’t Glasgow do a one-off change and make the 2023-censored works eligible for the 2024 ballot?
I read “A Memory Called Empire” because it won in 2020. It was amazing. I hope the Hugos continue to point me to such good work.
People were wronged. You can’t just say “Oh well, that’s in the past, let’s move on.” What was wrong needs to be set right.
Add a Retro-Hugo for 2023 to the 2025 WorldCon. There, problem solved as best we can. A Retro Hugo is a separate election from the current Hugo, so no concerns about unfair competition with the current Hugo nominees. Yes, it won’t be the same as if honest and fair Hugo elections were actually conducted at Chengdu 2023, but it’s better than just wringing our hands and saying “So sad, there’s nothing we can do…”
@Curtis Johnson:
Because a moment’s thought should make it obvious that this isn’t a thing that can happen, absent a time machine.
For example, we’ll never know if one of the other novels could have beaten Babel for the 2023 Hugo for Best Novel, but if you put it on the list, I’m rather certain it’s going to win the 2024 Hugo, whether or not it’s actually better than the book that would otherwise have been voted the best novel of last year.
You can’t undo the asterisk that needs to be added to the 2023 Hugos. All adding the victims to this year’s ballot would do is add another asterisk to the 2024 Hugos, because of the massive sympathy vote they’d get.
(For that matter, I’d also consider the winners to be additional victims, since their award will forever be stained, even if they might have won even without the fixing.)
This isn’t a stain that can be fixed by letting it spread to this year’s Hugos.
Beyond that, based on the deep dive that Zion in Ulthos did on the emails, there’s the issue that the admins appeared to have just declared a massive numbers of ballots invalid on grounds of “collusion”–which does not appear to be a cognizable ground in the WSFS constitution–and didn’t even include the nominated works in the long list.
Best Novel would have been 4/6 Chinese works, and some categories 6/6. I have to wonder if the admins just unilaterally decided that there would be backlash against Western works being shut out entirely in some categories, and once they meddled, started thinking they had the power to curate the list as they pleased. How do you fix that?
While I think John Scalzi’s harsh comments about Dave McCarty are justified, the Hugo Awards committee also included Ben Yalow, Ann Marie Rudolph and Diane Lacey:
https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2023-hugo-awards/?fbclid=IwAR16u-nGS9XJOnIsvZnJ3HV08mHWA6mSPB4cl-xzWsBCLVjKZ30r0mubCpU
Diane Lacey has tried to redeem herself by coming forward with new information, and good for her, but Yalow and Rudolph participated in the censorship and the coverup. They share responsibility, too, but somehow all of the opprobium has been heaped upon Dave McCarty.
Tom Jackson is exactly right. All of them are responsible and all of them need to be banned forever from any position of authority in fandom.
::fancycwabs::
Well, that Mayonnaise jar on Funk & Wagnall’s porch is still looking for work after Johnny Carson retired….
For those of you too young to get that reference, here’s a video clip—https://youtu.be/xuFSWcNe8hY?si=9h3vLfAG7J_xbpSt
The ONLY good thing about this fiasco is that there were hurt feelings, and probably hurt reputations and commercial prospects — but no jail time (at least not yet) or body bags. Looking for a polished-tinfoil lining to this climate-change-enhanced stormcloud…
Once upon a time, a Figure in the Field (whose name I’m blanking on at the moment) proclaimed that “The golden age of science fiction is twelve.” That might be unduly generous for this nonsense. Unfortunately, the apparent alternative is a golden age of, well, golden-agers — the best-known SMOFs — running things.
Perhaps what this says, more than anything else, is that there needs to be some substantial revision to the bid process to host a WorldCon, perhaps (just throwing an idea out here) vote-weighting such that individuals have a declining-weight vote for each year of their membership for the three years preceding the bid selection. That can, if constructed properly, make it a lot harder (not impossible) for a sudden rash of last-minute purchases of memberships to select an unusual location, as appears to have happened for Chengdu over Winnipeg (IIRC) this time around. Or something else; I’m just stating an example of controlling mishaps through controlling underlying circumstances (one need never complain about excessive stopping distance on wet pavement at 150kph if one pays attention to that 100kph speed limit, instead of determining the one is Very Important Indeed and entitled to flout that limit Just Because).
Any system involving humans expressing “preferences” and then reaching a resolution based on differing preferences can, and almost certainly will be, subverted at one point or another. One can strive to improve matters, but perfection is not achievable: It involves humans.
What an absolute nightmare. :(
This is a valuable lesson, not only for the Hugos but for everyone: if your organization runs on customs and traditions and assumptions of good behaviour (as opposed to unambiguous and set-in-stone set of rules), then it’s only a matter of time before somebody comes along and abuses that informal culture, and then do as much damage as they can get away with.
Dave did that with the 2023 Hugos. Trump did that during his entire presidency. There are plenty of other examples of well-meaning organizations that got absolutely shattered (if not outright destroyed) by those who abuse such ambiguity. :(
“Beyond that, based on the deep dive that Zion in Ulthos did on the emails, there’s the issue that the admins appeared to have just declared a massive numbers of ballots invalid on grounds of “collusion”–which does not appear to be a cognizable ground in the WSFS constitution–and didn’t even include the nominated works in the long list.”
I haven’t seen that, and it sounds interesting. Do you know where I could find that? Search engines are letting me down on this one.
File770 currently has some follow-up about the various reactions with links (our host’s current post included). Since one of the links takes us to Mary Robinette Kowal
(https://bsky.app/profile/maryrobinette.bsky.social/post/3klgpwgkli52c) I followed that one, and found it quite informative (brief, but clarifying).
Marcelo:
“I see people saying, ‘I would have resigned/gone public’….” I find myself in a RL version of this, where your point rings…uncomfortably true.
You don’t know what you’ll do until it’s upon you.
[Deleted because this fellow believes he is special and that my rules here don’t apply to him — JS]
Laertes:
It’s mentioned in the article :
In an email dated June 7, 2023 at 6:18 PM and sent to the Western Hugo administrators, Dave McCarty said “Tomorrow I have a 4 hour meeting with my chinese counterpart to look at ballot detail and determine if any ballots are to be voided (which happens with frequency so that it’s not really that controversial if we determine we need to do it)
But I haven’t read the emails yet to see the full context. This brings up another concern beyond the 2023 voting. If, as McCarty states, that voiding ballots is a common occurrence, one assumes that it has happened in previous Hugo cycles as well. Since Hugo voting is explicitly a pay to play system (see the Hugo FAQ if you have any doubts), one could argue that there is an obligation to honor the ballot created when the payment is accepted. I don’t know whether the ballot disclaims the requirement to count a vote that is correctly cast, but without some disclosure, it would seem some liability attaches to soliciting payment for a vote and then arbitrarily discarding it.
so… “virtualized Hugo” awards…?
no nation, no city, just a web site
and to be eligible to vote you gotta buy a ‘membership ticket’ via credit card
good news… no censorship nor religious constraints as per Florida or Saudi Arabia
bad news… this has got to have flaws I’m too naive to see (that and suspicions of long-covid-fog-creep occurring yet again)
perhaps only way to somewhat compensate identifiable victims would be: (a) allow another opportunity to be nominated and then (b) to have the next Hugo cycle awarding two prizes in each category to top two candidates
John, you and Laertes each have opinions about what happened. We clearly do not have enough information to confirm either as fact.
It’s your blog so you can claim he is wrong, but that utterly horrifies me. My impression of you has just crashed completely out of orbit after years of reading every post. On Whatever.
Dear folks,
Reading all the comments here, it feels to me like there is a lot of apocalyptic, binary thinking going on — people suggesting this forever taints the Hugos and/or Worldcons; that we must somehow rectify this unjustice or negate the awards, or else they are irredeemably damaged; that if they don’t perceive others hold the same degree and flavor of outrage they are feeling, then fandom is being complacent about this and will continue to conduct business as usual.
Tackling the last point first, because it’s the easiest: can anyone point me to the conversation that is approving of what happened in Chengdu, ’cause I can’t find it. (I am intentionally filtering out the sad puppy/ tinfoil hat crowd [hi, Alex! hi, Kevin!]) This is as close to unanimity as I’ve seen fandom on any issue in the (OMG!) 50 years I’ve been part of it. People are, collectively, really pissed off, including the shakers and movers. I’ve never seen this contentious bunch so in accord on any issue.
(Well, OK, this: “SF is a good thing!” That aside…)
Do you think steps aren’t going to be taken to see that this never happens again? Think again. There are already wheels in motion to change the rules to take control of the Hugo voting process out of the hands of the Worldcon committee. I would bet my bottom dollar that some version of that will pass the first vote in Glasgow. Yes, it takes two years to ratify, but we don’t have anything to worry about for two years… unless you think the Glasgow and Seattle committees are speaking in bad faith. In which case, please present your evidence. **
One major cultural benefit of every Worldcon being utterly independent of the previous ones that it is impossible for a Worldcon to taint future ones. Trust me, we have had worse concom fuckups than Chengdu. The stink doesn’t carry over. Worldcons are annual parties that are distinct.
Emphasis on “annual.” If you don’t like this year’s Worldcon, there will be one next year. If Uganda won the bid—frickin’ unlikely!—people like me would be utterly and justifiably terrified to go and a whole bunch of our allies would refuse to attend out of disgust. So, yeah, a 2028 Ugandacon would be a write-off. And then 2029 would be Dublin and we would be back to normal.
Ditto the Hugo’s. Many people, including quite a few of my friends, got screwed over by the corrupt process. That is an outrage. But the suggestion that somehow (through a magical mechanism that doesn’t exist) the 2023 Hugo’s should be voided or somehow done over confuses moral outrage with artistic merit.
No argument — the people who were unjustly kept off the list got screwed! But how many of the 2023 nominees and winners were not Hugo–worthy candidates? Putting aside personal taste. When I look at the novel category to my mind five of the six absolutely deserved to be there (and the one I think didn’t is just my taste—it was still a good read).
Is anyone going to suggest the Nettle & Bone isn’t a Hugo-worthy book? In a fair vote it might not have won, probably wouldn’t have, but it’s a deserving work.
Paul Weimer is a friend of mine and a wonderful person and I am seriously pissed off that he got hurt the way he did, but… does anyone really think Chris Barkley isn’t a Hugo-worthy fan writer? I mean, really!?
Yes, the winners’ awards were tainted by a corrupt process,… but their work wasn’t!
The Hugos will survive this single-point failure just as they did the Sad Puppies (which arguably was more damaging to that year’s candidates).
**((Very likely we don’t have anything to worry about for four years—it seems unlikely at this point the Tel Aviv could win a Worldcon bid over Montreal and I have no doubt that if the rules haven’t changed by the time of the Montreal convention, they will honor the same transparency pledge.
As for Uganda? Australia is bidding against them. Has Australia ever lost a Worldcon bid?!))
(please excuse any word-salad. Apple Dictate’s fault)
pax, Ctein
We (as in WSFS) could authorize the excluded nominees to use “Banned from 2023 Hugo Award” stickers with the official rocket logo.
The amount of racist nonsense on display in this thread really makes me doubtful about the chances of solving any problems for future awards. So many people here are desperate to blame some abstract conception of “the Chinese” for this and exculpate the committee members from their proud engagement in wildly unethical behavior.
“But maybe there really was a secret conspiracy by Chinese authorities to censor things and Dave is being hung out to dry while the real culprits avoid responsibility” is not supportable and if you advance this position you are actively carrying water for the choice by American members of the community, nominally long in good standing to pre-emptively censor works on a whim. There is no polite disagreement here, just people who are on the correct side of this and people who are not.
The mere siting of a literary awards presentation to a country that gives itself the right of censorship is foolish.
China? What were they thinking?
Yes, there is good literature coming from that country, but that does not excuse the conduct of that country.
Nettle & Bone was a very good novel. In my opinion it deserved to win second place in the Hugo best novel category. I think Babel should have won first place. I say this as a big fan of Ursula Vernon. Sometimes one of your favorite authors writes a really awesome book but that same year another author writes a book that is even more amazing and deserves the Hugo. However, if Babel had been on the ballot and Nettle & Bone had won in a fair contest, I would not have been unhappy with that result.
The thing is, Ursula Vernon would be better off without a best novel Hugo that probably would have gone to another author without outrageous fraud on the part of the Hugo committee. In a timeline where the Hugo awards were not hopelessly discredited 2023 probably would not have been her year due to the extremely stiff competition, but 2024 might well have been her year to win fair and square with no asterisk. She has released multiple outstanding books since Nettle & Bone. Voters will probably be less inclined to vote for her in future Hugos if she is perceived as already having a best novel Hugo that belongs to another author.
Everyone, including the winners, would be better off if the 2023 Hugos could just be canceled. If the nominees had been informed before the vote that the committee had kept the best novel front runner off the ballot for political reasons or because committee members were perhaps paid to do so, no doubt Ursula Vernon would have declined the nomination and could enter future Hugos with a clean slate. During a rather recent previous Hugos fiasco, the solution was to have no award in most Hugo categories. No awards is so much better than fraudulent awards. That option was not on the menu this time around due to a deliberate cover up by the Hugo committee.
The takeaway from this seems to be that the members of the Hugo committee can commit fraud and as long as they don’t get caught until after the vote, they can get clean away with it, taking whatever money they may possibly have been paid with them. There are no penalties for fraud worse than not being on future Hugo committees, boo hoo. And, noone can ever reverse the damage done by known fraud, because procedures or something. Because the fraudulent awards are fraudulently on the fraudulent books and somehow that is the important thing.
NancyMcC:
I’m not here to conform to your opinions, or to make you happy, so that’s fine.
Beyond that, I don’t disagree with Laertes that China is a fundamentally censorious country. That would be ridiculous. What I am saying is that apparently the Chinese government didn’t have to do any overt censorship of specific works or nominees — the Hugo administrators were more than happy to do it, enthusiastically, and poorly to boot. Perhaps they should have left it to the experts.
Gretchen Johnson:
You’re very invested in what should have happened, it seems. It might be better to focus on what needs to happen moving forward.
She has released multiple outstanding books since Nettle & Bone. Voters will probably be less inclined to vote for her in future Hugos if she is perceived as already having a best novel Hugo that belongs to another author.*
Not if she writes a novel that blows them away.
You, uh, kinda outted yourself and your own less than meritorious way of thinking.
(Forgive the formatting errors on the post above, it was supposed to have been italica and a numbered list.)
Yeah, WordPress does funky thinks to numbered lists in comments, I need to go under the hood and fix that.
Also, Ursula Vernon won three Hugos prior to the Novel win. It seems unlikely the voters are going to hold this fracas against her.
I wonder how well an anthology of the blocked works would do?
The problem would be that even if China officially had nothing to do with the mess, I doubt they’d allow a book that would have to include an explanation of what happened, and that’s where a huge chunk of the audience for this would be.
I’ve been wondering if there is the possibility of litigation against the Hugo administrators. Winning the Hugo is a big deal for a writer’s career so any work that was wrongfully excluded from consideration, especially if they won other awards during that year and so could reasonably have expected to have a chance of winning the Hugo if they were under consideration, could show financial harm.
I mostly am outside the loop, so I learned about this from this post. It literally made me weepy [blurry screen syndrome] in a way that the sad puppies did not.
I think it’s worth backing up a bit and making clear what I am and am not claming.
I’m claiming that:
== Given what we know of the way the Chinese system works, we have every reason to expect that the locals that McCarty interacted with would have briefed him on the kind of content and guests that should be avoided so as not to frighten or upset his hosts.
== The evidence we have of what went down in Chengdu is very limited. Mostly, we only know about stuff that was emailed to Diane Lacey.
== In his private communications with the other western administrators, McCarty outright claims to have received “guidance” about censorship from the Chinese members of the committee.
== Dave McCarty is a known liar.
== Some of the work by this committee of inexperienced censors lacking deep knowledge of the local customs and language was pretty shoddy.
== The work of this committee on compiling dossiers was outright monstrous. Their work has done much harm, and may yet do much more. They’ve much to be ashamed of.
== On the available evidence, it’s just barely possible that McCarty formed the list of sensitive topics on his own, lied to the rest of the committee about receiving it from his Chinese counterparts, and lied about taking meetings to seek further guidance.
== Mr. Scalzi is pretty sure the above is the real story, but interprets absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
== It’s much more likely that McCarty received clear and actionable guidance about the nature of persons and subjects to be avoided, and he communicated these requirements to his reports.
== This kind of result was the all-but-inevitable result of siting a Worldcon in China, and would surely happen again if it were tried again, even with entirely different administrators.
I’m emphatically not claiming that:
== The persons who instructed McCarty, if such exist, held government office.
== The instructions he may have received took the form of writs/warrants/diktats.
== The difference between formal “overt” demands from local government figures and guidance from the guys from the local chamber of commerce or whatever is a significant one.
== McCarty’s culpability is in any way diminished if he was guided by his hosts.
== The quality of the censors work product is important or relevant.
== I’m certain that I know what happened.
It seems wild to me that the nomination, voting, and award process for the Hugos doesn’t remain a centrally organised function carried out by the WSFS.
Why not? It should be the same process every year, with little if any influence from where WorldCon is located.
It would also take some pressure off the backs of the volunteer teams dedicated to organising the convention, knowing that that process will be managed centrally the same way each year.
They get given the awards lists, hand them out, and all done. It would make transparency so much easier, as there could be a standard format for release immediately after each event from the same centralised outlet for it.
I’ll be at WorldCon this year, and I’m looking forward to it as the SFF community in the UK and especially Scotland is thriving. I just hope the Glasgow team manage to both ease concerns and deliver the promised and necessary transparency and aren’t so overwhelmed by the pressure put on them by the fraud carried out last year that it’s harmful to their health. That’s going to be a hard combination to pull off.
@Tristan Gray
That makes a whole lot of sense and seems like the simplest solution. Probably requires some funding, but I would think that would be doable.
I am a supremely underinformed person in all this, and have never participated in Hugo voting in any form, but like a lot of others, pay attention to the winners (and the nominees) on the basis that their works must be pretty darn good.
So take this for what it’s worth.
What would be the downside of “rerunning” the voting at a future date, such as the 2025 convention, with the nominations corrected and the censorship removed, and then if any differences in the winners arise, make it a “tie” and issue the award to both the current winner and the revised winner?
People already know the 2023 results are in question. People will know that a revote will likely skew things in at least some cases – we’ll never know what the results of a properly run 2023 vote would have been.
But it sounds like the options are to leave the results the way they are, with the excluded works out of contention for ever, or rerun the vote somehow, taking away the award from anyone who doesn’t win in the rerun.
What if we did both? It’s a serious question. The only reason I can think of (besides the logistical nightmare it might be), is that someone who currently has the Hugo and didn’t win it all over again would “have that victory tainted.” But it’s already tainted now.
EPH is simple in principle, a bit more complicated to handle ties. You nominate X works, and each nominee gets 1/X points from your ballot. After all the points are added up, the work with the lowest number of points is dropped and erased from all the nomination ballots that have it. (This is where tiebreaking rules may need to be applied.) Then the process is rerun until only the required number of nominees remain.
So if you nominated five works, each gets 1/5 point from you. If a nominee is erased from your ballot, now you only have four, so each gets 1/4 point on the next run. And so on. If you feel very strongly about a work, you can just nominate that single one, and it will be worth 1 point in all the votes unless it’s eliminated.
The hardest thing about dealing with nominations has nothing to do with EPH, but with data cleaning. You can imagine ballots nominating “Starter Villain”, “Start Villain”, “Starter Villian”, and so on. It’s even worse when it comes to individual TV episodes or comic books. Someone has to go through the hundreds or thousands of ballots with dozens of nominations on each and figure out what each one really means.
@q
Heinlein visited the USSR and wrote about it. Among many things, he wrote that the Russians of the day were proud of their culture and at the same time deeply insecure about it. He wrote, and purported to demonstrate by recounting an example or two, that they could easily be manipulated by playing on their insecurity. Call a Russian uncultured or uncivilized, he wrote, and they’d quickly submit and do whatever you were demanding, to get you to take it back.
I speculate that someone’s out there writing that Americans may be similarly manipulated with clumsy accusations of racism.
Brother, I grew up in a small town in the Midwest in the 70s. I learned racism from professionals. You sound like a guy who learned the word yesterday.
Laertes:
“Mr. Scalzi is pretty sure the above is the real story”
I mean, if you say so.
It’s pretty clear Dave received from others at least a basic understanding of topics that would be perceived as controversial. We know that from the emails. Where he and the others went with it is on their own initiative, and extremely poorly done with regard to what would actually be an issue for the Chinese. Again, they disqualified a novel already available in China, and a fan writer for visiting Nepal. They should have been on the ballot, full stop.
So: They signed on to be censors, which they should not have done and would be a shameful disqualification in itself, and also, if that wasn’t bad enough, fucked it up.
All this is true, and also, none of it requires any overt act on the part of the Chinese aside from what we know to be a fairly vague set of communicated boundaries. There may also be more specific instruction, but that’s not currently known, and even if there were, it doesn’t change the culpability of the North American Hugo administrators for their censoriousness and incompetence.
Again, they should have left the censorship to the experts (and then, in my opinion, resigned when the experts told them to censor the finalist slate). It still reads to me like you’re trying to mitigate the actions of the Hugo administrators by assigning the blame up the chain, even with your “what I’m not doing” caveat.
That’s your prerogative, but I think it’s giving the Hugo administrators too much cover. Aside from anything else which may or may not be true, their own willing and documented actions bring discredit to them, and damaged the award.
“It still reads to me like you’re trying to mitigate the actions of the Hugo administrators by assigning the blame up the chain.”
I mean, if you say so.
Let me cut to the chase: Would you vote to hold another Worldcon in China, supposing that the country’s government/business culture doesn’t significantly change between now and then, and if the Hugos were administered by a new and untainted crew that you know and trust?
It feels like one of the things that need to happen is that there should be proposal at the next business meeting to formalize the software that is to be used (including periodic review/update) and forcing the worldcon to use an independent auditor to verify the results of the voting.
I think it would also behoove both Glasgow and Seattle to hire an independent auditor for their Hugo awards.
Because the voting discrepancies, and the hints that McCarthy made that Administrators have used their powers in the past to make ballots disappear without grounds are troubling.
“What would be the downside of “rerunning” the voting at a future date …”
Hugo Awards ballots are destroyed after all voting tabulation is completed.
Yeah. Re-tabulating the 2023 votes isn’t possible.
But…okay, check out this line in Wikipedia about the Retro-Hugos: “They are awards given for years in which no Hugos were originally awarded.”
Now, IIUC, Retro-Hugos are usually awarded 50, 75, or 100 years later. But that seems like a one-line changelist.
And it’s fair to ask: Were any Hugos legitimately awarded in 2023?
@Laertes: Are you bidding to hold another Worldcon in China? Nobody else is that I have heard of. Who is on your committee? How do you propose to deal with the censorship problem?
Laertes:
Indeed, I do say so. I’ll say it again, if you like. Moreover, you’re continuing to do it with your “cut to the chase.” Which, again, is your prerogative, but again, does not mitigate the actions of the Hugo administrators.
With that said, it’s clear this particular conversation is unlikely to be fruitful from this point, so I suggest we put a cap on it. You may continue to chat with other folks in the thread if you like, however.
@Tom Becker: I’m not, and I think it’d be a bad idea. I propose to deal with the censorship problem by never again permitting a Worldcon to be held there. Their system, as presently constituted, is guaranteed to corrupt the administration of the Hugos.
And I fear that the lesson too many people are taking away from the 2023 debacle is that the decision to hold a Worldcon in China was a reasonable one that only went wrong because of McCarty et al.
” I suggest we put a cap on it.”
You got it. I remain your grateful guest. Thanks for the engagement.
“You may continue to chat with other folks in the thread if you like, however.”
Thank you kindly. I think I shall.
Jeff Copeland wrote “In the last century Broadway producer David Bellasco used to tell folks pitching a story to him: “If you can’t write your idea on the back of my business card, you don’t have a clear idea.” I can explain counting the final ballot on the back of my business card; EPH takes roughly a full page of the WSFS constitution.”
I don’t have a business card. Would an explanation of the basic mechanics written on a Post-It note be sufficient? [I’d define the term NIC at step 2 and use it in the remaining steps to save space. And yes, this does fit on a Post-It. My hand hurts a little from the strain of writing small but legibly but I confirmed it.] This doesn’t get into full detail about tiebreaking or the “no award” check but it explains most of the process.
All nominees that have at least 1 first place vote on a valid ballot are in contention.
Tally the first place votes, considering only nominees in contention (NIC) on each ballot.
While no NIC has a majority of first place votes
3a. The NIC with the lowest number of first place votes is no longer in contention.
3b. Retally the first place votes, considering only NIC on each ballot.
The NIC with the majority of first place votes in the tally wins.
Of course the full summary with all the edge/corner cases would be longer.
Here’s my take on it:
It doesn’t matter what the Chinese members of ConCom or the sponsors or even their government did at this point. Key folks from the Western side did participate in what amounts to defrauding the process, and doing so heavily. Finding out the exact reasons and whether or not the Chinese side did stuff might help with determining how to adjust for it in the rules to keep it from happening again (I won’t say ever, that’s never going to be certain), but overall it’s not germaine to the fact that the rules have to change to mitigate it in the future, and the real risk right now is that the established business process (currently at 18-24 months) may potentially wind up being too slow to accomplish the needed changes before too many people decide that the award itself is no longer relevant to them. I’d actually recommend that Seattle look at what comes out of the business meeting, and consider committing to some of the ratified changes as long as they don’t violate other rules in the WSFS constitution.
Unfortunately, long term it’s likely left a bad taste in the mouths of Chinese fans, and cast their whole experiment in a bad light, possibly soured them for a generation on dealing with Western fandom, and even anyone Western who did NOT participate in the defrauding of the process are likely to get some blowback in the convention scene because few people are coming forward with sufficient evidence for who and who was not involved, and thus will suffer “guilt by association”. We do at least have people resigning publicly, even if it has probably been proceeded with other people in their committees taking them into closed meetings and telling them they need to resign so everyone else can get on with the business of undoing the heavy damage they caused in the process of doing what they did, possibly with the idea that at least if they do so they may eventually reclaim some position in fandom, even if they’ll never hold a seat of authority again.
An odd thing about this is that two weeks ago I didn’t know anything about Dave McCarty, and now I (and countless others in fandom) know he can’t be trusted.
When you trade away your integrity, do you ever get it back? I wonder if he thinks it was worth it.
In answer to “where do we go from here?”
One of the places I think we need to go to is that there needs to be a formal, written, official whistleblower policy for Worldcons. Preferably one with someone to report who has considerable authority (both formal and informal) but no direct responsiblities (so they are unlikely to have done things that need the whistle blowing upon, but will get listened to). People like yourself, John, or MRK. People who are a bit semi-detached from SMOFdom, but whom the SMOFs will respect. While a formal role can be created with formal powers, the social power is absolutely required – because if they come to you and you say “go public” and then they do… then you shield them from a lot of the backlash.
Someone people can call when they feel a bit off about doing what they’ve been told to do and get guidance over whether to go public, pushback internally, or get their heads down and do their job.
And also some clear rules about not retaliating when people do go public with concerns about the running of the con or the awards or other WSFS matters.
@Jeff Copeland: Are you the same person credited here on the official Hugo Awards website’s explanation of the voting system?
“Some years ago, a fellow named Jeffrey Copeland wrote a computer program to automate this process, and most recent Hugo Award administrators have used this program to count the ballots and produce the mounds of statistics so beloved by Hugo watchers.”
https://www.thehugoawards.org/the-voting-system/
When the voting software is written well and regression tested after every change, that’s more important to me than whether ranked choice or EPH are easy to boil down to simple explanations.
@Richard Gadsden
February 16, 2024, 12:57 pm
I think I whistleblower “hotline” needs to be totally independent to be seen as a proper venue to process issues that woould get nowhere in the community.
So, ideally someone who is not a WSFS member while “being” the hotline, and even better someone who has never been a WSFS member.
No offence to John, or MKR, but they have past associaton with WSFS, and their impartiality could be questioned.
Basically, I think an effort needs to be made to avoid a perception that there could be a connection between a whistleblower hotline and anyone associated with WSFS.
And as I write that, I realise that it would probably be best if the person/institution whistleblowers go to is not a part of SFFH fandom, but is an outsider who will not know that “Joe is a valued member of the community, so he can be trusted” or that “Kylie has been on concoms every year since 1987, so her integrity is not in question”.
Moving forward, if irregularities are discovered, what is actually going to be done about it? If it is discovered that someone has been wrongfully left off the ballot, and the nomination ballots have been preserved, is it possible to cancel the first set of ballots and issue corrected ballots? If there is reason to believe that nominations have “disappeared,” is it possible to replace the entire committee, reissue nomination ballots, and start over? If it is not possible/too late to have a clean and valid Hugo awards, is there someone able and willing to rule that there will be no Hugo awards this year in the affected categories? Or in the case of corruption in the committee, is there someone able and willing to rule that there will be no Hugo awards this year, period?
There’s one way to fix the 2023 Hugo Awards. Delete them. Vacate all results. There were no winners, nominees, etc. Sucks equally for everyone involved. It REALLY sucks for WSFS but if they wanted things to have turned out better they should have done better.
Gretchen Johnson:
Excellent questions! Please come up with a strategy and present them at the WSFS business meetings, and if you think I’m joking about this, no, I’m not, seriously, please do.
Tahnru:
Not to pick on you specifically, but more generally, it is becoming tiresome to make the point that barring a time machine, we can’t go back and change things. It’s literally not a thing we can do. So, again, the issue is what to do moving forward.
I think if one has concrete suggestions, holding them for the Business Meeting is not the most effective way to proceed, though it’s certainly an option. Presumably there will be at least one committee working on the issues. The meeting (really, any large meeting) is a very tough place to actually get into a substantive discussion.
We were asked to rule on a critical feature of the ballot counting process for the Chengdu proposal on the spot on the basis of very little information, and in retrospect I can’t help wondering if the information supplied was even accurate, as far as it went.
Dear Gretchen (and others who have expressed similar sentiments),
“Everyone, including the winners, would be better off if the 2023 Hugos could just be canceled.”
“The thing is, Ursula Vernon would be better off without a best novel Hugo that probably would have gone to another author…”
Excuse me… Or don’t… But before you go around taking away awards from people, even if they are “tainted”, don’t you think that maybe you should ask THEM how they feel about that?! So many people are talking about the winners being innocent victims but seem willing to victimize them more by deciding for them whether or not they keep the awards.
That’s up to them. If you get ALL of them to agree that they should relinquish their Hugos, then you’ve got a moral leg to stand on. Until you do, you’re only talking about punishing the “victims” even more.
Unless, of course, you think the winners really aren’t merit-worthy, even if they wouldn’t have won first place in a fair fight.
Dear John (and others who have expressed similar sentiments),
“I’ve been wondering if there is the possibility of litigation against the Hugo administrators.”
Good God!!! Talk about over-reaction! This is not “high crimes and misdemeanors”, it’s a frikkin’ Hugo! it’s a great egoboo and a MODEST boost to income and, boy, would I love to have one (and never will). But that’s it!
So you want to drag the perps through horribly expensive and time-consuming court proceedings? Over THAT?!
Talk about overreaction. Why not just go straight to tarring and feathering them, or possibly hang them from the nearest tree. Eliminate a whole bunch of red tape.
Dear Laertes,
With all due respect to your points… which DO deserve respect…
You’ve been repeating yourself, uhhh… repeatedly. Saying the same thing over and over, worded slightly differently, isn’t going to change anyone’s mind. I mean, we did hear you; you were eloquent and clear.
So, perhaps, enough? Maybe you can let it go?
(please excuse any word-salad. Apple Dictate’s fault)
pax, Ctein
I am a bit confused by the comments about how it is very difficult to game EPH without it showing up in the statistics. In fact, it is trivial for a group of bad actors to do so in a manner that can only be detected by a hand recount.
Assume a set of works that we have sorted by EPH, because really, all we’ve got here is a set of rules for sorting. Let’s assign them letters A-Z, in order. In order for us to count the ballots via EPH, the data needs to have been entered into a database.
Entries A-E would normally qualify for the ballot; however, it is important to me that entry B not be on on the ballot for whatever reason. All that needs to be done is to convert all of the votes for B into votes for F and vice-versa, which is a trivial operation in the database.
Oh, darn! B just missed making the ballot.
Whatever ones says about the Hugo administration for Chengdu (and this is praising with extremely faint damns), it’s clear that there was no effort to cover up what was done, because I know Dave McCarty well enough to know that he’s a good enough programmer to switch the B and F tags.
(Heck, you could do it with a simple cut and paste on the final results as well, but cleaning up the database to match helps cover your tracks.)
Bill Roeper: Nominations are correlated; if you nominated A, B, C, D and ZZA (that weird thing only you like) the stats need to show that when ZZA was eliminated, B benefited and not F – or else you will know the stats are wrong, so swapping numbers for B and F isn’t a safe way to fudge.
@Andrew
February 16, 2024, 4:55 pm
I thought EPH was designed to eliminate slates. Why would it remove the weird thing only you like from what is considered for nomination?
(The rest is not part of the reply.)
The more I see people try to explain EPH, the more it seems to have been designed as a way to limit “outside influence” on an award that is supposed to represent SFFH fandom as a whole.
Seems like EPH needs to go, and maybe instead make a rule you have to nominate zero or ten works in each category.
And while I am suggesting Hugo voting reform, get rid of “instant run-off”.
There has been multiple instance of a work just scraping into fourt when fifth is elimiated winning.
Just do one vote in each category on the shortlist and count votes.
The more complicated the sytem the more ripe it is for abuse.
Oh, and for gods’ sake let a non-SFFH entity count nominations and votes in the future if you want the Hugos to be taken seriously.
Why, yes, if the results are published in enough detail to show that there was only one nomination for ZZA and you know that you made it and that you didn’t nominate F, you can detect this.
Has anyone actually published the results going all the way down to the elimination of items nominated by one person? Or have they published all of the nominating ballots (anonymized, of course). If so, happy to concede the point.
Otherwise, you will never be able to see this particular type of swap in the general noise, because you would have to have certain knowledge of enough different submitted nominating ballots to be able to do so.
@Weirdimage: That nominees that get only one vote fail to win isn’t really a flaw of EPH. It’s a natural result of any reasonable vote-counting system.
[Deleted unread — JS]
Kind of wish you weren’t on my side.
[Deleted for responding to a deleted post. No worries, Miles, you’re good — JS]
Bill: My example works in less extreme cases too – and with hundreds of nominators and lots of categories, there’s likely someone who nominated uniquely enough to make blatant skullduggery obvious. I’m not guaranteeing every act of corruption would be detected – but a number-alterer needs to be sure that every alteration is undetectable, which seems hard. This year I see that the stats went down to a work with only 10 nominations – so someone whose nominations included that work can see where his points should go have gone and if they didn’t go there.
PS Cam collected a few dozen people’s reports of what they nominated, which evidence made the purported stats
https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2024/02/07/an-update-on-an-earlier-table/
Andrew
February 16, 2024, 4:55 pm
The claim is that the thing gets eliminated from consideration because of EPH for being on a slate, not that it is eliminated because it got too few votes to end up on the final ballot.
Putting aside the “only you liked” hyperbole, what is the purpose of EPH if it only removes the least popular works?
Being more direct with with my comment, instead of subtly hinting, how does EPH differentiate between what is organically popular, and what is a slate.
I don’t see that is even possible without someone subjectively telling the program what they consider a slate is.
My suggestions on nomination/vote counting was really an idea of how not to have a computer program decide how to weight votes.
In my opinion, if you want to be truly objective, you either ban slates, which I think would have to include eligibility posts, and suggested reading lists, to not give popular people an advantage, or you just count votes.
Dear Kevin,
If you think you can Rules-Lawyer your way around Our Esteemed Host, you may be in for a Rude Awakening.
(see I can mis-use caps, too)
In truth I didn’t even make it a third of the way through your screed because honest-to-god, Throwing in Caps all over the Place made it to goddam Hard to Read!
pax / Ctein
Weirdmage: I was focusing on how detectable fraud is with EPH (quite detectable but not perfect). EPH reduces the effectiveness of slates by (in effect) reducing the power of identical ballots. Analysis by voting system expert Bill Schneier here https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/2016/05/a_proportional_votin.html
Andrew
February 16, 2024, 6:48 pm
Sorry, the link you gave me starts with saying it is a proposal for EPH, and stopping “minority voting blocs”, which could just be fan-groups made aware of the Hugos by an author.
I have no interest in reading that.
To detect fraud you have to use an objective definition of fraud, and then check every single entry against that definition.
Slates and fraud are two completely different things as long as slates are legal, which they are in Hugo nominations.
Identical ballots are usually referred to as a decision by a majority, this would be naturally occuring if recommendation lists are allowed. (Similar to political parties vs totally independent people standing for election.)
The more popular the venue with the recommendation list, the more similar ballots gets.
Should not votes be tossed out at the top end, not the bottom, if slate-avoidance is the object?
How does EPH differentia between the suggested reading list from a Chinese magazine that is the biggest magazine in the world (that apparently were deleted as “collusion”), and the fans of one author who are asked to vote for one of their works instead of another(, which apparently was allowed)?
Sorry if you feel I am having a go at you personally.
I am just debating what I have seen people say since the mid 2010s that you represent here.
“Nettle & Bone was a very good novel. In my opinion it deserved to win second place in the Hugo best novel category. I think Babel should have won first place.”
Speaking as someone who loved NETTLE & BONE but only liked about the first half of BABEL, I’d have voted for NETTLE & BONE…
…with the caveat that I didn’t read all of the novels on the ballot, so I might have liked something else even more. And I wasn’t a member of that Worldcon and so couldn’t vote anyway.
“And I fear that the lesson too many people are taking away from the 2023 debacle is that the decision to hold a Worldcon in China was a reasonable one that only went wrong because of McCarty et al.”
I haven’t seen anything suggesting that.
kdb
@Wirdmage: You’re missing the point.
EPH is primarily about breaking the power of slates. As a welcome side-effect, it makes certain forms of ballot-counting shenanigans more difficult to conceal.
You got linked to a real good explanation of what it is and how it works. If you turned back because some of the phrasing wasn’t to your tastes, that’s really on you. It’s nobody else’s responsibility to serve it up to you in more agreeable dress.
@Wirdmage
EPH reduces the effect of multiple identical ballots thus making it more difficult for an organized slate to dominate the finalist list. It does NOT distinguish among the causes of multiple identical ballots. And it does not make it IMPOSSIBLE for a slate to dominate the finalist list, it just makes it more difficult.
(Your contention that a majority of identical ballots is “naturally occurring” is simply not true for the Hugo nomination process, based on the entire history of that process. Among other things, there is no social mechanism to produce such a majority and a general climate of opinion against organized slates.)
Laertes
February 16, 2024, 7:35 pm
I asked direct questions about EPH, that have not been answered.
Those include questions about slates.
I have no obligation to look at something that pre-dates EPH, especially since I know that there can be a massive difference between a WSFS rule-change suggestion and what ends up as a rule.
Perhaps, instead of ignoring my questions in favour of arguing I need to look at one person’s suggested rule change, you could make an effort to answer my direct questions?
I’ll help you by repeating one here:
“How does EPH differentiate between the suggested reading list from a Chinese magazine that is the biggest magazine in the world (that apparently were deleted as “collusion”), and the fans of one author who are asked to vote for one of their works instead of another(, which apparently was allowed)?”
@Michael I
February 16, 2024, 7:48 pm
“Your contention that a majority of identical ballots is “naturally occurring” is simply not true”
Good thing I never claimed that then…
What I actually said was:
“Identical ballots are usually referred to as a decision by a majority, this would be naturally occuring if recommendation lists are allowed. (Similar to political parties vs totally independent people standing for election.)”
“It does NOT distinguish among the causes of multiple identical ballots.”
So, according to you, it does not actually address “malicious” slates at all.
Let’s go back to Chengdu;
do you think a Chinese Worldcon having very few Chinese nominees is likely?
Totally valid. I genuinely enjoyed Nettle & Bone very much. I liked The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking and What Moves the Dead even more.
However, for me Babel was really a standout novel. It stuck with me more than anything else I have read for several years at least.
Relative quality of two novels is largely subjective, especially when they are both really good books.
Had there been a fair contest, I would not have been disappointed with the results regardless of who won.
To be clear, I was responding to Kurt Busiek.
Weirdmage: By fraud, I mean fake numbers produced by rogue Hugo admins. EPH makes that more detectable than previously; EPH makes slates of any kind less effective – that’s why it was created. The analysis I posted explains how that works, better than I could. EPH does not and cannot defeat a majority preference for any work or group of works – but I wouldn’t want it to do so. It does defeat a minority attempt (whether deliberately or non-deliberately done) to completely dominate the final ballot.
“How does EPH differentiate between the suggested reading list from a Chinese magazine that is the biggest magazine in the world (that apparently were deleted as “collusion”), and the fans of one author who are asked to vote for one of their works instead of another(, which apparently was allowed)?“
Fans of one author voting for that one work in one category does not end up looking like a slate, which covers how to vote in most or all categories.
kdb
@Weirdmage
1) As I noted, EPH does not distinguish between causes of identical ballots. It addresses collusion of any sort by making it more difficult for any slate to succeed. If it wasn’t clear, the apparent tossing out of ballots on the grounds of collusion was a SERIOUS violation of Hugo rules. “Collusion” (however it is defined) is NOT an allowed reason for discarding a ballot.
2) Since recommendation lists are clearly not banned by Hugo rules, you did, in fact, say that a majority of identical ballots would be “naturally occurring”.
3) EPH makes slates of any kind less likely to be effective. That is the main reason it was adopted.
Kurt Busiek
February 16, 2024, 8:17 pm
“Fans of one author voting for that one work in one category does not end up looking like a slate, which covers how to vote in most or all categories.”
Eh…
Non-organic voting can be for one category.
I can’t be arsed to count Hugo categories, but an author eligible in five categories telling their fans to vote or them is either manipulation (slate) or fans voring.
If a slate is defined as completely identical voting , then it would be very easy to by-pass that to manipulate the vote.
EPH seems meaningless from what you say.
“EPH seems meaningless from what you say.”
That seems to be the conclusion you’re insistent on reaching, and unless someone’s willing to walk you through every aspect of it, essentially re-creating the discussion from years back, you’ll revert to that, and refuse to read anything about how and why it works.
Have a good night, and I will leave you to your self-chosen ignorance.
Michael I
February 16, 2024, 8:23 pm
“1) As I noted, EPH does not distinguish between causes of identical ballots. It addresses collusion of any sort by making it more difficult for any slate to succeed. If it wasn’t clear, the apparent tossing out of ballots on the grounds of collusion was a SERIOUS violation of Hugo rules. “Collusion” (however it is defined) is NOT an allowed reason for discarding a ballot.”
If it does not distinguish between causes of identical ballots, then it is useless.
Especially if recommendation lists are OK.
Everyone seems to be missing that I am looking for objective criteria that will always be applicable.
And you seem to be missing that you’re an extravagantly tedious person who’s a lot of work, and no fun, to interact with.
Kurt Busiek
February 16, 2024, 8:41 pm
“That seems to be the conclusion you’re insistent on reaching, and unless someone’s willing to walk you through every aspect of it, essentially re-creating the discussion from years back, you’ll revert to that, and refuse to read anything about how and why it works.”
You, and everyone else supporting EPH seem to be intent on misrepresenting what I say.
I said:
“Kurt Busiek
February 16, 2024, 8:17 pm
“Fans of one author voting for that one work in one category does not end up looking like a slate, which covers how to vote in most or all categories.”
Eh…
Non-organic voting can be for one category.
I can’t be arsed to count Hugo categories, but an author eligible in five categories telling their fans to vote or them is either manipulation (slate) or fans voting.
If a slate is defined as completely identical voting , then it would be very easy to by-pass that to manipulate the vote.
EPH seems meaningless from what you say.”
You chose to ignore all but the last sentence of that, which tells me you have no interest in an honest debate.
Not sure how you got me being wilfully ignorant from what I said, but I will ignore you so I don’t say something about how you come accross that warrants a ban hammer from the host of this commet thread.
“You chose to ignore all but the last sentence of that, which tells me you have no interest in an honest debate.”
I have no interest in a debate period.
I answered your question about one specific thing and you tried to treat it as a description of the entire system. You won’t familiarize yourself with the actual system, you just want someone else to explain it all to in ways you can accept or you’ll just be truculent about it.
What I think you’re rapidly discovering is that people have a limit for caring about whether you understand it. The more you insist on being explained to, while you oppose the explanations, the less collegial the responses will get.
If you’re actually interested, the information is out there, and you’ve been pointed to some of it.
If you’re only interested as long as someone else does all the work for you, you’re a bore, and your refusal to approve of a system you don’t understand will not have any effect on how or whether it works, so go ahead and keep not-understanding it.
It’s not our job to placate you.
@Weirdmage
EPH makes slates less effective in dominating a category. That is not meaningless.
EPH is not at issue. Departures from EPH are at issue. We did not have any notable problems when it was applied.
The main complications in the voting are the existing eligibility criteria, which must be respected regardless of how the votes are counted. These require facts to be taken into consideration, in addition to votes. So some time and energy (presumably, from volunteers) and discretion will always be required to make those determinations.
EPH is not at issue. Do I repeat myself? I do.
There’s a fundamental premise behind instant-runoff systems that is foreign to binary-choice ballots: Ensuring that the winner is NOT an unacceptable choice to a majority (not mere plurality) of those actually casting ballots. There are different explanations, systems, and preferences; we could argue all day whether Condorcet-family or iterative-elimination-family “ballot counting” systems for dealing with n>2 candidates is “superior,” but we’d actually be arguing about “superior for a particular culture, nature of decision, and permanence.” There are multivolume works in decision/game theory that can’t reach a consensus conclusion, so I’m not going to proclaim one — especially not since any analysis of fraud-prevention/detection in voting systems assumes both that there are no inconsistent humans involved and that there is no “tactical voting” (the unhousebroken pups were an example of one kind of tactical voting not so much in concept as in execution).
There are certainly worse systems than iterative-elimination ballot-counting (the present Hugo flavor is one of them; so is EBH). Every system for ballot-counting has a failure mode. Consider, for a moment, that an obvious “solution” to this particular fiasco would be to publish every single ballot. Even an “anonymization” effort will be insufficient, though; the particular variants of spam and phishing attacks in your e-mail inbox demonstrate that pretty well (and we’re just not going to discuss how governments might both go farther and impose worse consequences than 647 unread e-mails promising that your Nigerian prince has come at the end of the weekend; it’s called “traffic analysis,” it’s been in widespread use for over a century, and “data analytics” is just the benign commercialized offshoot). And that shows up in whatever misguided “protection” efforts were engaged in, by whomever, at Chengdu.
And all of this is before acknowledging that we’re talking about “literary/artistic reputations in the now” as the subject of the voting. I find it extremely difficult to imagine a more-futile context for determining the objectively-correct result of a popular vote among people who’ve read the works at different times and under different circumstances! Which is not to say that nobody should try — just that they shouldn’t expect inevitable success if they just try hard enough.
Regarding the fraud of the voters that got the Worldcon to go to China, in Song of the Azalea, by secret Party member Kenneth Ore, he writes: “…Before the general elections, the Party would sent six hundred or so students from left wing schools to join the club, just in time to vote. These members would be the “iron voucher” voters who would vote as the Party dictated.
…In the months that followed, most of the iron-voucher students also left. They had served their purpose.
Although I was at the time a willing participant in the process, I had for the first time witnessed the communists’ distortion of the electoral process. But I didn’t feel it was wrong. I believed the Party was right and knew what was best for Hok Yau and for China.”
@ Bill Roper
“I know Dave McCarty well enough to know that he’s a good enough programmer to switch the B and F tags.”
He’s not, though. :) About 10 days ago, Dave gave a podcast interview. In it, he confessed that he’d written a SQL query to tabulate the votes, and then didn’t verify the output, and that’s why there are huge discrepancies in the released numbers.
He. Did not. Verify. The output.
At my old company, we fired temps for a lot less than that. It doesn’t matter how hoity-toity you are or how much alleged experience you have – if you don’t do something this basic… It’s like a surgeon refusing to wash their hands before an open-heart surgery because they’re a rockstar, and they don’t have time for such petty nonsense.
…so no, I’m sorry, but your friend is objectively bad at programming. He had one job. :)
Ctein, while information about the Hugos fiasco was coming out, I had neither BlueSky nor that other thing, so I was more out of loop on Hugos news than usual. However, even then I knew that the high profile authors affected by this had publicly lamented that there is no mechanism in place to give back a Hugo. The 2023 winners were nonconsenually saddled with fraudulent Hugos that just become more and more embarrassing as new and horrifying twists in this story continue to unfold. So no, less and less do I feel like I need to ask the winners if they would object to the cancelation of their 2023 Hugos.
I know that there is currently no mechanism in place for retroactively canceling a whole year of Hugo awards. (And also it sounds like there is no mechanism in place for appropriately addressing Hugos tampering before the Hugo awards.) I also know that it would probably take at least two years to authorize such a move. I am hearing that noone wants to deal with that or has the bandwidth for that. Also, I am hearing that noone is willing to pause the Hugos for as long as it would take to put any procedures in place to prevent the distribution of fraudulent Hugos going forward.
The previous framing of the 2023 Hugos as mostly valid except that a few candidates were unjustly left off the ballots is inaccurate. Top to bottom, the candidates on the ballots were hand picked by McCarty according to a deranged system of his own devising. Not one single 2023 Hugo award has any meaning or validity. That really, really sucks for everyone affected. However, I just don’t see how the Hugos can move forward without squarely addressing this reality.
Gretchen: it sounds to me like some people are in fact working on proposals to fix the structural problems. But it takes time because of how WSFS chooses to do business. (Using Robert’s Rules of Order the way they do is terrible and anti-recommended by many people offering advice on setting up organizations.) it takes time: first to identify specific actions that we’d like to see taken, then to draft the suggestions in suitably formal language. I expect that we’ll hear more throughout the spring and summer, based on how EPH evolved.
@scalzi, you invited suggestions on how to improve the Hugo ballot process.
Here’s the process our local elections office uses to do so – https://www.kitsap.gov/auditor/Pages/Certification-and-data.aspx
There’s even nifty videos… TL;DR – a sequential set of audits to verify results. As a locally elected person, I like to think they get it right!
Not sure if this degree of rigor is warranted, but for closer to the Hugo process, please take a look. There may be a simplified version of this process that would work.
Here’s to seeing you in Seattle in a couple years…
Gretchen Johnson:
“I am hearing that noone wants to deal with that or has the bandwidth for that.”
You are grievously misinformed about that.
Do you at this point have much to add aside from a certain, determined doomerism, and an annoyance that people do not see your point of view as correct? At this point, it does not appear so.
I’d like to address a bit I was glad to see Scalzi acknowledge that has been underexplored in what comments I’ve skimmed:
“…but more importantly I felt the community of science fiction fans sharing my joy at holding that trophy…The Hugos mean something to the community…What keeps the Hugos relevant is the choice of people who love and value science fiction and fantasy to make it so.”
The engaged, passionate fandom in the science fiction community is ultimately the reason these awards manifest in the first place, and that community is (correctly!) demanding that the mistakes be accounted for and rectified. (See Henry Jenkins “Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers for the full-length academic take on fandom’s relationship to authors, musicians, etc.)
Without wanting to downplay the severity of this, I don’t see this as unrecoverable by any means, in large part because the community engagement within the sci-fi sphere remains strong and active and passionate. People care about this, which is the most important thing.