My priority questions about the Hugo Stats

camestrosfelapton

Jan 21

Eligibility decisions. There are a lot of disqualifications and I think that was to be expected given works in multiple languages and many new voters. However, there are several that need further explanation from the Hugo Comittee:
- Paul Weimer in Best Fanwriter: this is wholly mysterious. Quite how somebody can be ineligible in this category I have no idea.
- Babel in Best Novel. It has been deemed eligible in several awards. In what way was it in ineligible for the Hugo Awards?
- Xiran Jay Zhao in Astounding. Astounding eligibility is complex but this case is unclear.
- Sandman episode 6 in BDP short: Very unclear why this was ineligible. Also if this episode was ineligible how did that impact the eligibility of the whole series in BDP long?
- Some general discussion on eligibility and the number of disqualifications would be appreciated.
Counting issues:
- The nomination statistics for Babel do not appear to be correct. For each round, it is listed as 164.93 regardless of how other works are eliminated. This is very unusual and the number should increase. This does not appear to be connected to its disqualification as other disqualified works do not show the same pattern (eg Color the World in Best Novelette). There are some stories in Best Short Story that have a sort of similar pattern that you might see if they had a "bullet voting" set of votes but even they shift towards the end. I think we can safely rule out mass bullet voting for Babel.
- Turing Food Court is listed twice in Best Novelette. In position 10 it has 67 votes and in position 12 it has 27 votes. Assuming this is the same story, that gives it a total of 94 votes and the 8th ranked story on raw votes. It is not possible to see how it would have fared in the elimination rounds but that combined number makes it not implausible that it was a finalist.