Hugo Voting Annoucement from the Glasgow Team

By camestrosfelapton on Jul 23, 2024

Well topics to write about this morning just keeping coming along. No sooner had I finished the second post of this morning when this pops up:

https://glasgow2024.org/hugo-awards/statement-22-july-2024/

Short version: Nicholas Whyte explains that 377 fraudulent votes have been disallowed from the ballot. The votes favoured one finalist who the Hugo committee is not naming as they don't believe they were aware of the ballot stuffing attempt. The Hugo stats will be released as promised after the award ceremony but the stats won't include the excluded 377 votes.

It does sound like the fraud wasn't subtle:

"A large number of votes in 2024 were cast by accounts which fail to meet the criteria of being "natural persons", with obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics. These included, for instance, a run of voters whose second names were identical except that the first letter was changed, in alphabetical order; and a run of voters whose names were translations of consecutive numbers."

And also:

"we received a confidential report that at least one person had sponsored the purchase of WSFS memberships by large numbers of individuals, who were refunded the cost of membership after confirming that they had voted as the sponsor wished"

For obvious reasons, the Hugo Committee isn't going to reveal much more than that. It's very good that they've been open about this in general. Obviously my natural curiosity means I'd love to know which finalist the votes were directed at, and what the numbers look like with the fraudulent votes still in there...but that's not going to happen for good reasons.

As Nicholas Whyte suggests, this does point to the Hugo voting needing some external kind of auditing/checking. There's been lots of debate about this since the McCarty affair and I don't know what form that should take. Things like this do need a degree of internal accountability as well and even more mundane parts of the process (deciding on eligibility) require knowledge of the genre and involve policy decisions that would be hard for an external agency to do. However, a combination of the current system and external checks might work.

Anyway, kudos to Whyte and his team for being clear on this issue.