So the first level answer to this is the published stats are a work of fiction and you may as well ask how many socks did Sherlock Holmes own. We shouldn't be afraid of the world of fiction though and I keep ending up doing back of the envelope calculations because people keep asking...and the quantity (rather like Sherlock Holmes's socks) is inconsistent.
So, time to go a bit more methodical. Here are few assumptions which are definitely wrong but which give us a way in.
- For each place on the longlist in each category, the relative proportion of total ballots represents a similarish number each year (less so at the extremes).
- English-speaking voters mainly voted for English-language nominees and Chinese-speaking voters mainly voted for Chinese-language nominees.
- There were 1847 ballots cast in total.
Major exceptions and/or doubts exist around each of those. I can't claim to be sure that "1847" is true. However, what we can do is this.
- Calculate what percentage of the total ballot every nominee received.
- Calculate what percentage for each rank 1-15 in each category received on average 2017-2022.
- Divide one by the other.
- If a nominee was classified as English-language then that's an estimate for the number of English speaking voters and the number of Chinese voters is 1847 - English voters...and vice versa.
- Draw a graph. Realise the numbers are absurd but post the graph anyway.
So, lets us add a more reasonable assumption: there were not large numbers of anti-matter fans from negative space voting.
It's still pretty silly.
OK, I'll get rid of the strangest categories and also get rid of the top 5 nominees. This is still pretty ridiculous, indicating that the number of English speaking voters is somewhere between none and all of them.
On the Razor's Edge in Best Short Story had 687 and is the Chinese language work with the most votes over all. Assuming that no English speaking voters nominated it would mean the number of such voters couldn't be more than 1160.
If I increase the sizes of the bins...
I don't know...800 is what I'd guess but lots of numbers there to suggest hundreds more or hundreds less than. None of the assumptions I made to get to that very loose estimate are sound either.
If I really cherry pick categories and boil it down to Dramatic Pres - Short, Editor - Short, Fan Artist, Fan Writer, Semiprozine and Short story:
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