The Sasquan committee reports they have already received 2,300 ballots. How many more will come in by the time 2015 Hugo Awards voting closes at 11:59 p.m. (PDT) on July 31?
Will Sasquan break LonCon 3’s record of 3,587 Hugo votes? That’s what fans expect. While LonCon 3 had 2,882 supporting members, Sasquan already has 5,410 supporting members. Why else would a such a large number of people step up to buy supporting memberships? Surely it can’t be just to read the Sad Puppy nominees in the Hugo Voter Packet.
There actually is one other possibility. Not only can supporting members vote in the Hugos, they also can buy a Site Selection membership and vote on where the 2017 Worldcon will take place. Four bids are vying for the right to host 2017 – Helsinki, Montreal, Nippon, and Washington D.C.
Site Selection voter turnout tends to peak when Eastern U.S. bids are in the race. Vincent Docherty’s compilation (click here to open spreadsheet) shows 2,564 people voted on the 1995 site (Glasgow beat Atlanta), a record that still stands. Then 2,168 voted on the 2001 site (Philadelphia beat Orlando), and 2,094 voted on the 2004 site (Boston beat Charlotte). These races rank one-two-three as the highest vote counts ever.
What’s more, quite often throughout Worldcon history the Site Selection vote count has vastly outnumbered the Hugo vote. (Although that was not true last year, when only 758 votes were cast to determine the 2016 Worldcon host.) Supporting members may do both, vote for the Hugos and in SiteSelection, but they often don’t.
So we’re all left waiting to discover the real reason behind the huge bump in supporting memberships.
The full press release follows the jump.
MEDIA RELEASE #2015-8 Sasquan, the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention 19-23 August 2015 at Spokane WA USA http://www.sasquan.org [email protected] HUGO AWARDS VOTING CLOSES SOON
Spokane, Washington, 15 July 2015
Voting for the Hugo Awards for 2015, honoring work published in 2014, closes 31 July 2015 at 11:59 PM PDT. We have already received 2300 ballots, including 20 that were mailed to us.
In order to vote for the awards, you must have a membership in Sasquan. You may vote online at http://sasquan.org/hugo-awards/voting/. If you wish to vote by a paper ballot, send your ballot to Sasquan Hugo Awards, c/o OSFCI, POBox 5703, Portland OR USA 97228-5703. Ballots must reach us before the deadline. Memberships may be purchased through the day of the deadline.
If you are voting online, you can change your ballot online up until the close of voting: log in with your registration number and PIN to see what your current ballot looks like. If you’ve decided on your votes for some categories, you can vote on them now and others later.
It is possible that there will be substantial demand near the end of the voting period, so please buy your membership and vote early. We are not liable for our servers becoming overloaded, or for problems with our hosting service. The best way to make sure your ballot gets counted is to vote early.
To vote on the Hugos, please go to http://sasquan.org/hugo-awards/voting/.
More Sasquan membership and registration information is available at https://sasquan.swoc.us/sasquan/reg.php
ENDS For general media enquiries about Sasquan please contact [email protected].
To unsubscribe, click here: [email protected]?subject=unsubscribe
ABOUT THE WORLD SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION Founded in 1939, the World Science Fiction Convention is one of the largest international gatherings of authors, artists, editors, publishers, and fans of science fiction and fantasy. The annual Hugo Awards, the leading award for excellence in the fields of science fiction and fantasy, are voted on by the Worldcon membership and presented during the convention. Sasquan is organized under the banner of the SWOC: http://swoc.org/contact.php
“World Science Fiction Society”, “WSFS”, “World Science Fiction Convention”, “Worldcon”, “NASFiC”, “Hugo Award”, the Hugo Award Logo, and the distinctive design of the Hugo Award Trophy Rocket are service marks of the World Science Fiction Society, an unincorporated literary society.
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Well if increased participation in the voting happens as a result of the canine onslaught, I guess that will be one good thing to emerge from the mess. Hopefully, some of these folks will even stick around after the whole thing blows over.
Actually, I can think of one other positive development from this: the fact that the young Tumblr activist “SJW” side of fandom and the old pharts have found a common goal and have started talking to each other. Where one fannish rift has opened, another seems to have healed.
I finally finished “The Three-Body Problem” today. Some neat ideas there, and some parts of the book are quite gripping, but hundreds of pages in the middle felt like a slog… it was as if the author had taken Bertolt Brecht’s theories on writing a bit too seriously.
I’m also not entirely convinced why this is considered “hard-SF”. Sure, the central conceit is expressed using the concept of physics, but, as far as I can tell, it’s not really physics that has a whole lot to do with current theory or extrapolation thereof. This is then a bit irritating when a character says something along the line of “and when we send this over, its working will look to those ignorant savages like magic“.
TBP remains #3 on my ballot. Unlike the bottom two entries, I consider it worth reading, but I find the top two far more readable.
Oops, “when we send this over” should have been “when we send this (magical device) over”
My wife and I have “voted” in that we have filled out part of the ballot and submitted those choices. But we’re not done voting.
I filled out my ballot but may want to fill some things in below No Award. But I wanted to make sure the No Award part got done even if I got hit by a bus or something before I got all my reading finished.
ULTRAGOTHA: My wife and I have “voted” in that we have filled out part of the ballot and submitted those choices. But we’re not done voting.
I do the incremental voting thing, too — it’s a good way to ensure that if there are last minute server overloads or other issues with voting or with my personal circumstances, that as much of my selections as possible get registered.
Especially with the large volume of voters expected this year, I encourage others to consider voting as early as possible (you can always add to or change your votes later), to avoid being shut out by heavy traffic at the deadline.
I really like the ability to vote in increments. I’m still thinking about the fan categories, and not done with reading/listening there, while I’m confident about the fiction and editor categories.
I have finished voting, but I reserve the right to change my mind in the next two weeks and change my votes on some things. I just finished up my reviewing and linked to all of them at http://realtegan.blogspot.com/p/hugo-2015-posts.html so I can refer back to them as I reread and review. I plan on posting my “first-draft” ballot sometime this weekend.
Despite the puppy poop, it was more fun to do than I expected. I hope the next two years are as pleasant.
The Hugos are one of the few polls where “vote early and vote often” is a feature, not a bug.
I presume this is a count of email/paper ballots sent in, not online ballots?
The online incremental ballot is a great feature, I’ve gone back to tweak my vote a few times since I first filled it in.
Since the ballots in the past have been over 95% online, I would assume that the count includes any on-line ballots with one or more preferences in at least one category.
Sasquan: We have already received 2300 ballots, including 20 that were mailed to us.
Ray: I presume this is a count of email/paper ballots sent in, not online ballots? The online incremental ballot is a great feature, I’ve gone back to tweak my vote a few times since I first filled it in.
Geoff Thorpe: Since the ballots in the past have been over 95% online, I would assume that the count includes any on-line ballots with one or more preferences in at least one category.
Correct; there is no e-mail voting. With the exception of the 20 paper mail-in ballots they’ve received, the rest of those 2300 ballots are people who’ve gone online and entered at least one preference in one category.
And yes, the ability to enter a partial ballot early and keep adding to / tweaking it up until the deadline is really a marvelous thing. Otherwise, a lot of people would probably wait until the last moment to vote so that they could finish as much reading as possible (I know I would), and then perhaps miss their chance when server overload prevents getting into the site.
In that case I’m surprised its so low. But maybe people don’t know about the incremental feature and are waiting to make their final decisions before voting
I finished the bulk of my voting last week. I may tweak later, but I’m happy with my decisions. However, I do hope that in the future I have to agonize about which wonderful work to rank first! Even though this was my first year, I plan to support and vote in the future as well.
I didn’t realize how much the Hugos meant to me until they got messed with, and I don’t think I’m alone in this!
Remember Puppies, Calista House is based in Finland, so it would be really cool if you all voted for Helsinki, so they can be a big part of the 2017 con!
Remember Puppy Haters, Teddy Beale thinks that he can get more favourable constitution changes pushed through in a US worldcon in 2017, so y’all are best voting Helsinki.
Delete as applicable.
Consider me another person surprised that only 2300 ballots have been submitted so far.
(On the other hand, until Loncon last year hit 3587, the previous record was 2100, less than the votes already cast this year. 2300 is already more than twice as many as voted in 2010.)
I presume they meant “2300 ballots from unique members”.
I.e.: If you catted out all of the ballots, one to a line, with member ID as the first field, ran that through awk to make only the first field show up, |sort |uniq |wc -l, you’d get 2300 as the answer.
So it doesn’t matter if member #1573 has 429 entries in the “votes” table, only the last one will get counted as their actual “vote” in the Hugos, and will also properly only get “counted” as part of the total ballots tally.