Joshua Kronengold

Suspicious in the sense that their votes were coordinated in ways that (if the numbers in the stats represent anything at all) seem hard to get without flat-out deliberate coordinatinon well beyond what the Puppies managed. Of course, the numbers might not represent anything.

I'm upset about the 1000 disenfranchised voters, although I have mixed feelings as well because of how their votes might have (unfairly) affected candidates that deserved to be on the ballot. Ultimately, nomination only really serves one purpose: To agree upon a list of finalists that is small enough that the Hugo-voting worldcon community can consume all of it, judge it, and agree, at least in concept, that the winner actually was the best X in the previous year.

Slate voting (intentional -or- unintentional) tends to violate that principle, as the slate voters punch above their weight class, and can easily push works that would be preferred by the larger voting pool off the ballot entirely.

But, of course, the practice of simply removing all slate (non-fraudulent) votes is even worse. If a non-fraudulent slate represents 1/5 of the voting pool but is 6x larger than the number of votes given to the largest non-slate nominee, it might be unfair to give the slate the 4 slots on the ballot that EPH will give it(1). But similarly, it's -also- unfair to not give it at least the 2 slots that the people within it deserve by right of numbers; they seem to be real people who are Worldcon members just like everyone else.

So while MCarty's and Chendu's actions were unacceptable (if not nearly as -unpredicented- as the censorship), they were trying to solve a legitimate problem and did so with a hammer where a scalpel was needed. A MUCH better solution to the unfairness of coordinated votes possibly making a ballot unrepresentative would be for the admin to (and have the ability to) just increase the number of finalists that year. Doing so doesn't throw anyone off; it just means that the voters have a bit more work they have to consume and rank, and the result will geenrally be that the best/most favored work wins whether the admin was correct that the slate was unrepresentative or whether they were incorrect.

(1): Yes, I know; I helped come up with EPH and in fact argued strenuously that it -not- contain extra weighting to further discourage slating -- originally, when it was built on Making Light, and also later when EPH+ was argued in the Business Meeting that would have included harsher weighting. THe problem is, none of that would actually work. Applying extra-teratorial weight to a slate just encourages the slate dividing into a series of bullet votes -- which will be nearly as effective in dominating a voting pool, and far harder to deal with programatically. So while using multi-winner STV might be a better way to handle this, anti-slate weighting simply isn't.