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mnemeI've been seeing some hilariously bad takes being pointed to on Bluesky or otherwise on the blogosphere.
Ok, so for anyone getting to the news late, the Chengdu Worldcon's Hugos (that is, the 2023 Hugos) were fsked in multiple ways at the nomination stage, throwing entirely reasonable doubt onto the finalist's rights to be there for multiple categories:
1. A "slate" of about 1000 ballots, for a mix of works, but mostly Chinese works, were thrown out. Most notably, this doesn't appear to be an organized slate, but 1000 genuine Chinese fans who seem to have mostly voted for works published in a magazine (that said, if the data that seems to match the "slate" is matches the data from the supposedly slated works, their votes -were- highly coordinated in suspicious ways). This was never publicly announced, but leaked.
2. Numerous works were disqualified with no explanation (later leaks indicate that the normal "vetting" process that usually verifies that top potential finalists are qualified was abused to instead, or additionally, collect political information about the works and their creators, presumably so it could be used to determine which to disqualify them; some of this information is shockingly inaccurate).
3. Many of the unexplained DQs can be sourced to the "vetting". Others (most notably, the Sandman TV show) cannot.
Ok, so, I'm not going to repeat the excellent research done on this, and because I'm lazy I'm not going to track down links for it today. If someone comments with them in I can throw stuff in I think belongs.
But I've seen some terrible takes on this. Ones that claim that this was a concerted attempt to make sure Chinese writers didn't get nominated for major Hugos, or that it could have been HAPPENING FOR YEARS. Or that it was One Lone Rogue Admin.
But the evidence doesn't support this. No convention's nominations show the kind of data that indicate major tampering with the nominations this way (and none, including Chengdu, have anything showing major tampering with the votes themselves).
Instead, the evidence seems to point to the following:
1. Chengdu won the Worldcon.
2. At this point, long-time con volunteers who had offered their help to Chengdu (or been recruited) -- Dave McCarty and Ben Yalow, announced their position in the con (I may be off in timing but I know Ben was announced as a co-chair when the bid did their presentation and thus must have volunteered to help significantly earlier; Dave might for all I know have joined as Hugo administrator somewhat later).
3. Among other things, in advance of nominations going up, a competing magazine to the one primarily sponsoring the con posted a recommendation list with around 8 entries per category for major categories (a category can only have 6 (or fewer) finalists except in very strange, unlikely situations)
4. The con setup happened, stuff happened, eventually nominations happened and works were nominated for Hugos.
5. In particular, around 1000 or so people voted for things exclusively from the recommendation list in the magazine, forming an informal (apparently) but very effective slate that would likely have gotten ~4 items onto major categories with only 2 entries not from the list.
6. Nominations closed.
7. At this point, con staff (and other volunteers) attempted to handle multiple issues. First, they had noticed the "slate," and probably wanted to know what could be done about it. Second, there seems to have been an expectation that works that didn't accord with Chinese law would be removed from nomination.
8. Ok, so this brings us to the elephant in the room: Dave McCarty. Dave seems to have long been under the opinion that a Hugo committee could rule a work ineligible for the award at any time and for any reason. He has some cover in that The World Science Fiction Society constitution (which governs Worldcon and its Hugos) includes the phrase: "3.8.2: The Worldcon Committee shall determine the eligibility of nominees and
assignment to the proper category of works nominated in more than one category." A reasonable person would look at that phrase and assume it means that the committee should apply the -other rules- in the constitution (and there are a number of them) to determine which nominees are eligible for which awards, disqualify any that aren't eligible for any and move nominations to the right category if they were split between multiple categories. Dave's interpretation seems to, however, be that they can basically disqualify -any- works for any reason they choose, and also incidentally do the other stuff. After all, that's the rules (as we've seen from the controversy, Dave was kinda discounting the clear fact that rules aren't the only thing constraining a Worldcon committee -- public opinion and general assumptions of good practice are, but then, he according to good report tried to do this in 2016 (the second year a group ran an organized slate in order to push their own picks onto the Hugo ballot in opposition to the people who usually vote for these things, before we changed the rules to make this much harder) and was basically yelled at by multiple people on the concom (convention committee) until he backed off...for that year.
9. At this point, we have a mix of conjecture and what we actually know. We know that the "slate" was disqualified because that was leaked from internal memos. We know that volunteers sent emails asking for clarifications on vague vetting instructions (including stuff like "has been to Tibet", "mentions Taiwan", and "talks about Chinese history"). We don't actually know how big the slate is, but the numbers in the nomination report are sufficiently wonky that it's been theorized that the report was complied by just removing the "slated" works and advancing everything else up, leaving the traces of a 1000 ballot slate assigned to the wrong work. We also, from internal (leaked) memos have lists that list around 6-8 works with "1s" (indicating that they were at the top of the ballot--but if we combine that with the numbers on the statistics, that would probably mean they'd have dominated 4-5 entries on the ballot, not all 6 because the "EPH" system dilutes the effect of a slate, but that's a qualified deduction) that don't appear on the final ballot, all or most of them written in Chinese. And, of course, we know the released Nomination statistics, which include really numeric clustering, with unexplained disqualification and ballots that seem to be heavily clustered at the top, including ballots that would have to be believed to be heavily coordinated and supporting both English and Chinese works. And we have Dave's statements -- including that he was "following the rules that we must follow" and that the inconsistencies in the nomination statistics were (at least partially) because of coding issues.
But we can draw some plausible conclusions from this data:
Dave's ruling on the "slate" was that they should just eliminate it. Since he was the designated expert in Worldcon rules, it seems likely he got little if any pushback on this like he did in 2016. This happens to have eliminated numerous popular Chinese works from consideration (particularly for Novel), but that doesn't appear to be the intended aim; instead, Occam's razor indicates that the aim was going forwards with Dave's preferred way of handling slates (as it happens, he has campaigned against the -current- way of handling slates, that being the EPH system of reducing the power of highly coordinated unranked ballots, which I had some hand in designing, so applying his thoughts here when he had the power might have been part of his attempt to prove we didn't need EPH) as he wanted to do in 2016, not a conspiracy against Chinese works.
The volunteers who did "vetting" did point out (sometimes erroneous) political issues with some of the nominees. We don't know how their reports were used, but we know the results -- some of the nominees flagged were seated as nominees; others were DQed without explanation. Additionally, some other works were also DQed -- most notably the Sandman series and episode (one without explanation, one with the explanation that it was moved to the other category, but one can deduce that in fact they were both censored). We also know that a now-deleted Chinese website (government, I think)? talked about how "three teams" had vetted the Hugo nominees. From this, we can draw the conclusion that multiple teams associated with the 2023 Worldcon were working on political vetting -- the team we had a leak from (English speaking) and two other teams. (presumably one Chinese and looking at Chinese works, and one dealing with wider issues and probably LGBT, which probably was where the DQ research on Sandman came from, but this is speculation).
So, all this data was compiled, and the team (with Dave as the final call--but leaning on whoever in the convention was interpreting "the rules we must follow" -- that is, the often vague rules people use to avoid being externally and officially censored) determined what to DQ. And this included a combination of European authors and works--but also several authors of Chinese ancestry and family living outside of China. One could, of course, draw a conspiracy-theory explanation (ignoring, of course, the several creators DQed with no links to China at all, other than a trip to Nepal that a vetter confused for a trip to Tibet) that this was intended to hurt authors of Chinese ancestry (and it did, systemically), but a more plausible explanation presents itself: Authors of Chinese ancestry are quite likely to address topics of Chinese history, or have made blog posts about Chinese politics -- or other things that would have concerned the English-speaking vetters (and did). Yes, this includes Babel -- a work that was, during 2023, published in China with existent but minimal censorship and did extremely well there. But again, what is more plausible? That this was part of a conspiracy to remove Chinese works from the ballot? Or that the already-known guidelines the committee were much more likely to target people of Chinese ancestry and family history?
So, basically: A Chinese committee won a Worldcon. They recruited some folks (including Dave, who has some views about administrative power that don't match the rest of fandom's views about how such power and responsibility should be exercised). They then attempted to (with the help of volunteers) run the Hugos in a uniquely Chinese way, including self-censorship (the decision to remove an informal slate, however, seems likely to have been all Dave).
The result hit a lot of Chinese works (fortunately, there were still a lot of Chinese works on the shorter fiction categories), but we don't have a lot of evidence that this was intentional. Which isn't to say that none of it was! It -is- notable that the short fiction works had more Chinese works than the longer fiction categories, which may mean some of the "slated" works were allowed in the shorter fiction categories to produce a balance of western and eastern works. Or it might be that there were enough independent nominations of such works for them to make the ballot (for the shorter fiction works, the organic nominations are often quite small and so it's totally plausible that there would have been both coordinated nominations and non-coordinated nominations for such works in sufficient quantity to make the final ballot).
There's more, but that's enough; the result is a mess. As to what fandom in general (and specifically, Worldcon Business Meeting fandom which meets for 12 hours in most years to pass rules changes to the above-mentioned constitution and of which I for better or worse am a member but anyone who attends a Worldcon can join) should do about the situation to prevent it happening again in the future.
My take on things is that this was a bunch of issues:
1. A rogue convention concom with some odd loyalty (for one thing, it was dominated by the staff of a specific Chinese SF company).
2. A convention that was inside an autocratic state which understandably thought (likely correctly in concept, if not in execution) that they were legally obligated to curate the nominees of their awards to match government guidance.
3. A rogue Hugo admin who had some expansive ideas of his power and how he could responsibly exercise it (different things).
4. An attitude among Western con-runners and volunteers that "the show must go on" even if the result would be repugnant to Chinese and western fandom alike.
5. The utter lack of anyone outside of this concom who could provide a check on all of this (or, in fact, inside the concom, but that's not something one can make rules about).
So, then, what should we do about this? Well, different issues involve different solutions. But I can walk through a few:
Some issues were directly related to a Hugo admin with no oversight. As such, ideally there should be an observer of Hugo tabulation who does NOT report to the same authority as the admin who can flag issues that seem likely to affect the integrity of the award (thus acting as a check on the otherwise unchecked authority of the committee--particularly in confidential matters where normally the data is not exposed to the public).
What we don't need to do is pay someone to do this observation. The issue here wasn't bad tabulation (mostly); it was bad practice and a single source of authority, and having a check on it is the important thing. Fandom is a volunteer organization and this, too, can be handled with volunteers.
Some issues related to the country under whose authority the con was being run. If we don't want that happening again, we need to back away from the awards -- not just the convention -- being ultimately under the authority of whatever committee wins the bid to run Worldcon. Instead, we can rest ultimate authority over the awards (which should be run consistently and fairly) on an organization that's situated in a place with stable laws and rules (and yes, some parts of the US qualify) that would support such an organization. This wouldn't mean that Worldcon would stop being associated with the Hugos -- it would still be voted on by members of Worldcon (as members of WSFS), and we'd want to have the organization be elected by, again, members of Worldcon (as members of WSFS). There is some discussion to be had on how technically, the baseline membership of Worldcon that enables voting is now called "WSFS Member", but unless other steps are made, that's still functionally a kind of Worldcon membership and not a different thing, and this isn't the place to debate that. But no organization can stop a country ultimately being able to coerce an organization within its borders from doing basically anything with these awards...except making that organization not the ultimate authority over said awards.
Some issues related to the individuals involved. Yeah, sure, we probably shouldn't hire them again.
And finally, some issues related to the specific place the Worldcon was held. It might be better to make it much less likely that the Worldcon would be held in an unfree country again. That said, there are actually two ways of doing this:
1. We can trust to the voters (this didn't work this time because the Chinese voters outnumbered all other voters combined).
2. We can make rules saying that Worldcons shouldn't be held in unfree countries.
#2 is the thing mostly getting talked about, and it's both controversial and fairly easy to implement -- there are multiple organizations that specialize in rating countries by freedom. Peg our ratings to some of them and we're done.
That said, #1 has an appeal. There are many bad takes here (mostly involved in making it harder to vote) and I don't like them. The one approach I do like is to make it easier to vote -- it currently costs quite a bit to vote ($50 to the hosting convention and another $50 to the convention you're voting on the location of/leadership over, although that number can fluctuate) and making that number cheaper would likely significantly increase the number of voters each year (it would also make it cheaper for people to rally a bunch of people to vote in favor of a place, but...probably not as much). I'm sure others can mull over proposals for this, but mine would be:
1. Kill the rule saying that a Worldcon cannot charge more than 5x the voting fee / WSFS Membership Fee/ Supporting Membership Fee for their initial attending fees, and replace it with a rule that they must disclose the upper bound of their attending membership fees in their bid filing so we don't get surprises.
2. Additionally, kill the voting fee entirely and replace it with measures intended to help fund newly seated Worldcons other ways (they do really need the money to pay hotel deposits, but it doesn't need to come from voters) and a suggested discount for voters buying WSFS Memberships/Supporting Memberships and Attending Memberships to encourage people to vote (this would ALSO remove the current hack that someone attempting to "buy" a Worldcon by buying votes would get half the money involved back and all the money spent against them; now they'd get none of the money back). The combination would likely more than double the number of Site Selection voters in a typical year, resulting in a more democratic, more resilient process mostly supported by the votes of fans, whether or not we put in place a "must be in a free country" clause.
Hopefully, in this way, the process can become better, -and- we can restore trust that the nominees most supported by the most Worldcon-member fans will be the Hugo winners for that year.
Ok, so for anyone getting to the news late, the Chengdu Worldcon's Hugos (that is, the 2023 Hugos) were fsked in multiple ways at the nomination stage, throwing entirely reasonable doubt onto the finalist's rights to be there for multiple categories:
1. A "slate" of about 1000 ballots, for a mix of works, but mostly Chinese works, were thrown out. Most notably, this doesn't appear to be an organized slate, but 1000 genuine Chinese fans who seem to have mostly voted for works published in a magazine (that said, if the data that seems to match the "slate" is matches the data from the supposedly slated works, their votes -were- highly coordinated in suspicious ways). This was never publicly announced, but leaked.
2. Numerous works were disqualified with no explanation (later leaks indicate that the normal "vetting" process that usually verifies that top potential finalists are qualified was abused to instead, or additionally, collect political information about the works and their creators, presumably so it could be used to determine which to disqualify them; some of this information is shockingly inaccurate).
3. Many of the unexplained DQs can be sourced to the "vetting". Others (most notably, the Sandman TV show) cannot.
Ok, so, I'm not going to repeat the excellent research done on this, and because I'm lazy I'm not going to track down links for it today. If someone comments with them in I can throw stuff in I think belongs.
But I've seen some terrible takes on this. Ones that claim that this was a concerted attempt to make sure Chinese writers didn't get nominated for major Hugos, or that it could have been HAPPENING FOR YEARS. Or that it was One Lone Rogue Admin.
But the evidence doesn't support this. No convention's nominations show the kind of data that indicate major tampering with the nominations this way (and none, including Chengdu, have anything showing major tampering with the votes themselves).
Instead, the evidence seems to point to the following:
1. Chengdu won the Worldcon.
2. At this point, long-time con volunteers who had offered their help to Chengdu (or been recruited) -- Dave McCarty and Ben Yalow, announced their position in the con (I may be off in timing but I know Ben was announced as a co-chair when the bid did their presentation and thus must have volunteered to help significantly earlier; Dave might for all I know have joined as Hugo administrator somewhat later).
3. Among other things, in advance of nominations going up, a competing magazine to the one primarily sponsoring the con posted a recommendation list with around 8 entries per category for major categories (a category can only have 6 (or fewer) finalists except in very strange, unlikely situations)
4. The con setup happened, stuff happened, eventually nominations happened and works were nominated for Hugos.
5. In particular, around 1000 or so people voted for things exclusively from the recommendation list in the magazine, forming an informal (apparently) but very effective slate that would likely have gotten ~4 items onto major categories with only 2 entries not from the list.
6. Nominations closed.
7. At this point, con staff (and other volunteers) attempted to handle multiple issues. First, they had noticed the "slate," and probably wanted to know what could be done about it. Second, there seems to have been an expectation that works that didn't accord with Chinese law would be removed from nomination.
8. Ok, so this brings us to the elephant in the room: Dave McCarty. Dave seems to have long been under the opinion that a Hugo committee could rule a work ineligible for the award at any time and for any reason. He has some cover in that The World Science Fiction Society constitution (which governs Worldcon and its Hugos) includes the phrase: "3.8.2: The Worldcon Committee shall determine the eligibility of nominees and
assignment to the proper category of works nominated in more than one category." A reasonable person would look at that phrase and assume it means that the committee should apply the -other rules- in the constitution (and there are a number of them) to determine which nominees are eligible for which awards, disqualify any that aren't eligible for any and move nominations to the right category if they were split between multiple categories. Dave's interpretation seems to, however, be that they can basically disqualify -any- works for any reason they choose, and also incidentally do the other stuff. After all, that's the rules (as we've seen from the controversy, Dave was kinda discounting the clear fact that rules aren't the only thing constraining a Worldcon committee -- public opinion and general assumptions of good practice are, but then, he according to good report tried to do this in 2016 (the second year a group ran an organized slate in order to push their own picks onto the Hugo ballot in opposition to the people who usually vote for these things, before we changed the rules to make this much harder) and was basically yelled at by multiple people on the concom (convention committee) until he backed off...for that year.
9. At this point, we have a mix of conjecture and what we actually know. We know that the "slate" was disqualified because that was leaked from internal memos. We know that volunteers sent emails asking for clarifications on vague vetting instructions (including stuff like "has been to Tibet", "mentions Taiwan", and "talks about Chinese history"). We don't actually know how big the slate is, but the numbers in the nomination report are sufficiently wonky that it's been theorized that the report was complied by just removing the "slated" works and advancing everything else up, leaving the traces of a 1000 ballot slate assigned to the wrong work. We also, from internal (leaked) memos have lists that list around 6-8 works with "1s" (indicating that they were at the top of the ballot--but if we combine that with the numbers on the statistics, that would probably mean they'd have dominated 4-5 entries on the ballot, not all 6 because the "EPH" system dilutes the effect of a slate, but that's a qualified deduction) that don't appear on the final ballot, all or most of them written in Chinese. And, of course, we know the released Nomination statistics, which include really numeric clustering, with unexplained disqualification and ballots that seem to be heavily clustered at the top, including ballots that would have to be believed to be heavily coordinated and supporting both English and Chinese works. And we have Dave's statements -- including that he was "following the rules that we must follow" and that the inconsistencies in the nomination statistics were (at least partially) because of coding issues.
But we can draw some plausible conclusions from this data:
Dave's ruling on the "slate" was that they should just eliminate it. Since he was the designated expert in Worldcon rules, it seems likely he got little if any pushback on this like he did in 2016. This happens to have eliminated numerous popular Chinese works from consideration (particularly for Novel), but that doesn't appear to be the intended aim; instead, Occam's razor indicates that the aim was going forwards with Dave's preferred way of handling slates (as it happens, he has campaigned against the -current- way of handling slates, that being the EPH system of reducing the power of highly coordinated unranked ballots, which I had some hand in designing, so applying his thoughts here when he had the power might have been part of his attempt to prove we didn't need EPH) as he wanted to do in 2016, not a conspiracy against Chinese works.
The volunteers who did "vetting" did point out (sometimes erroneous) political issues with some of the nominees. We don't know how their reports were used, but we know the results -- some of the nominees flagged were seated as nominees; others were DQed without explanation. Additionally, some other works were also DQed -- most notably the Sandman series and episode (one without explanation, one with the explanation that it was moved to the other category, but one can deduce that in fact they were both censored). We also know that a now-deleted Chinese website (government, I think)? talked about how "three teams" had vetted the Hugo nominees. From this, we can draw the conclusion that multiple teams associated with the 2023 Worldcon were working on political vetting -- the team we had a leak from (English speaking) and two other teams. (presumably one Chinese and looking at Chinese works, and one dealing with wider issues and probably LGBT, which probably was where the DQ research on Sandman came from, but this is speculation).
So, all this data was compiled, and the team (with Dave as the final call--but leaning on whoever in the convention was interpreting "the rules we must follow" -- that is, the often vague rules people use to avoid being externally and officially censored) determined what to DQ. And this included a combination of European authors and works--but also several authors of Chinese ancestry and family living outside of China. One could, of course, draw a conspiracy-theory explanation (ignoring, of course, the several creators DQed with no links to China at all, other than a trip to Nepal that a vetter confused for a trip to Tibet) that this was intended to hurt authors of Chinese ancestry (and it did, systemically), but a more plausible explanation presents itself: Authors of Chinese ancestry are quite likely to address topics of Chinese history, or have made blog posts about Chinese politics -- or other things that would have concerned the English-speaking vetters (and did). Yes, this includes Babel -- a work that was, during 2023, published in China with existent but minimal censorship and did extremely well there. But again, what is more plausible? That this was part of a conspiracy to remove Chinese works from the ballot? Or that the already-known guidelines the committee were much more likely to target people of Chinese ancestry and family history?
So, basically: A Chinese committee won a Worldcon. They recruited some folks (including Dave, who has some views about administrative power that don't match the rest of fandom's views about how such power and responsibility should be exercised). They then attempted to (with the help of volunteers) run the Hugos in a uniquely Chinese way, including self-censorship (the decision to remove an informal slate, however, seems likely to have been all Dave).
The result hit a lot of Chinese works (fortunately, there were still a lot of Chinese works on the shorter fiction categories), but we don't have a lot of evidence that this was intentional. Which isn't to say that none of it was! It -is- notable that the short fiction works had more Chinese works than the longer fiction categories, which may mean some of the "slated" works were allowed in the shorter fiction categories to produce a balance of western and eastern works. Or it might be that there were enough independent nominations of such works for them to make the ballot (for the shorter fiction works, the organic nominations are often quite small and so it's totally plausible that there would have been both coordinated nominations and non-coordinated nominations for such works in sufficient quantity to make the final ballot).
There's more, but that's enough; the result is a mess. As to what fandom in general (and specifically, Worldcon Business Meeting fandom which meets for 12 hours in most years to pass rules changes to the above-mentioned constitution and of which I for better or worse am a member but anyone who attends a Worldcon can join) should do about the situation to prevent it happening again in the future.
My take on things is that this was a bunch of issues:
1. A rogue convention concom with some odd loyalty (for one thing, it was dominated by the staff of a specific Chinese SF company).
2. A convention that was inside an autocratic state which understandably thought (likely correctly in concept, if not in execution) that they were legally obligated to curate the nominees of their awards to match government guidance.
3. A rogue Hugo admin who had some expansive ideas of his power and how he could responsibly exercise it (different things).
4. An attitude among Western con-runners and volunteers that "the show must go on" even if the result would be repugnant to Chinese and western fandom alike.
5. The utter lack of anyone outside of this concom who could provide a check on all of this (or, in fact, inside the concom, but that's not something one can make rules about).
So, then, what should we do about this? Well, different issues involve different solutions. But I can walk through a few:
Some issues were directly related to a Hugo admin with no oversight. As such, ideally there should be an observer of Hugo tabulation who does NOT report to the same authority as the admin who can flag issues that seem likely to affect the integrity of the award (thus acting as a check on the otherwise unchecked authority of the committee--particularly in confidential matters where normally the data is not exposed to the public).
What we don't need to do is pay someone to do this observation. The issue here wasn't bad tabulation (mostly); it was bad practice and a single source of authority, and having a check on it is the important thing. Fandom is a volunteer organization and this, too, can be handled with volunteers.
Some issues related to the country under whose authority the con was being run. If we don't want that happening again, we need to back away from the awards -- not just the convention -- being ultimately under the authority of whatever committee wins the bid to run Worldcon. Instead, we can rest ultimate authority over the awards (which should be run consistently and fairly) on an organization that's situated in a place with stable laws and rules (and yes, some parts of the US qualify) that would support such an organization. This wouldn't mean that Worldcon would stop being associated with the Hugos -- it would still be voted on by members of Worldcon (as members of WSFS), and we'd want to have the organization be elected by, again, members of Worldcon (as members of WSFS). There is some discussion to be had on how technically, the baseline membership of Worldcon that enables voting is now called "WSFS Member", but unless other steps are made, that's still functionally a kind of Worldcon membership and not a different thing, and this isn't the place to debate that. But no organization can stop a country ultimately being able to coerce an organization within its borders from doing basically anything with these awards...except making that organization not the ultimate authority over said awards.
Some issues related to the individuals involved. Yeah, sure, we probably shouldn't hire them again.
And finally, some issues related to the specific place the Worldcon was held. It might be better to make it much less likely that the Worldcon would be held in an unfree country again. That said, there are actually two ways of doing this:
1. We can trust to the voters (this didn't work this time because the Chinese voters outnumbered all other voters combined).
2. We can make rules saying that Worldcons shouldn't be held in unfree countries.
#2 is the thing mostly getting talked about, and it's both controversial and fairly easy to implement -- there are multiple organizations that specialize in rating countries by freedom. Peg our ratings to some of them and we're done.
That said, #1 has an appeal. There are many bad takes here (mostly involved in making it harder to vote) and I don't like them. The one approach I do like is to make it easier to vote -- it currently costs quite a bit to vote ($50 to the hosting convention and another $50 to the convention you're voting on the location of/leadership over, although that number can fluctuate) and making that number cheaper would likely significantly increase the number of voters each year (it would also make it cheaper for people to rally a bunch of people to vote in favor of a place, but...probably not as much). I'm sure others can mull over proposals for this, but mine would be:
1. Kill the rule saying that a Worldcon cannot charge more than 5x the voting fee / WSFS Membership Fee/ Supporting Membership Fee for their initial attending fees, and replace it with a rule that they must disclose the upper bound of their attending membership fees in their bid filing so we don't get surprises.
2. Additionally, kill the voting fee entirely and replace it with measures intended to help fund newly seated Worldcons other ways (they do really need the money to pay hotel deposits, but it doesn't need to come from voters) and a suggested discount for voters buying WSFS Memberships/Supporting Memberships and Attending Memberships to encourage people to vote (this would ALSO remove the current hack that someone attempting to "buy" a Worldcon by buying votes would get half the money involved back and all the money spent against them; now they'd get none of the money back). The combination would likely more than double the number of Site Selection voters in a typical year, resulting in a more democratic, more resilient process mostly supported by the votes of fans, whether or not we put in place a "must be in a free country" clause.
Hopefully, in this way, the process can become better, -and- we can restore trust that the nominees most supported by the most Worldcon-member fans will be the Hugo winners for that year.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-27 12:32 am (UTC)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.