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Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom
A clean slate for commenting on today’s session.
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@Cheryl S: And I even double-checked! Well, it’s a happy accident. Felix culpa.
@Rick Moen: I know it won’t work, having been on the net since 86, but I wanted to say it anyway. I hope, as a friend, you can explain to Jo why he annoyed/scared people. You’re a big guy but do not give off threatening vibes in person b/c of your size, f’rex. And that “behaving violently and accidentally sounding like a Puppy” will not help his cause.
@John AA: Yep, I meant the winners. “Roads Must Roll” strikes (heh) me as very anti-socialist, though; at least anti-union.
I don’t know what you were taught about writing. In technical writing I learned if I kept needing to explain what I wrote again and again I was the problem not the reader.
I could have worded my “white men…” better. That’s on me.
Going around in circles with you telling me/us how (your tone not actual words:) stupid we are for not understanding context is feeling like #mansplaining given the number of women on File770 who have/had careers in writing. Please stop explaining the context of your comments to me. Thank you in advance for your consideration.
@lurkertype:
“‘Deserve.’ How preoccupied we are with that. With what we should have, with what we are owed. I wonder if any word has ever caused more heartache.”
From City of Blades. Which really hit the spot.
Nobody deserves a Hugo. Some people deserve them less than others. 😉
Rick Moen:
If they didn’t want to be blamed for the monster, perhaps they shouldn’t have started the process, recruited him, showed him what to do and set him going.
I’m not sure it’s reasonable to ask for consistency from a disorganized group like the Puppy-Kicking CHORF Cabal, or whatever group it is the Sads decided anyone who disagrees with them is a jackbooted agent of. I expect different people will have different reactions, and will tend to express their own reaction, rather than some approved group consensus, since the non-Puppies aren’t a group and don’t have a group consensus.
Cheryl:
After her first speech before the meeting, she said down behind me and said something to a friend about when she’d stop shaking. So yeah, I’m with you on the idea that it felt like getting up in front of a highly-unsympathetic group hostile to her aims, and was probably not remotely easy for her.
I wish she hadn’t cloaked her comments in such obfuscatory language, but I’m glad she felt able to get up and speak.
@Chip Hitchcock
and there was supposed/ to be a smiley in place of the ‘?’ it was in the preview….
No worries, I was tongue-in-cheeking myself. PS: Emojis and smilies don’t show up when posted here (although they do show in the preview box…very irritating.), so we have to make our emoticons the old-fashioned way 🙂
@lurkertype: Sure, I’ll have a go at it, next time I run across Jo Rhett, probably at a BASFA meeting. Nothing to lose but a few minutes of trying.
This wasn’t the first time Jo’s been a hothead, but certainly the first time (I heard of) when he interrupted an entire parliamentary assembly comprising hundreds of people, and ignored the chair and parliamentarian when they told him he was out of order and should sit the frak down.
Seriously, though, as I toddle towards my grave (58 years, needing a shot every three months to stay alive, though, yes, I do look an athletic 40, and smug about said fact, too), I’m increasingly of the view that people basically never change just because they’re asked; they change when changed circumstances kick them in the tochis and not a moment sooner.
I actually do work on that; thanks for noticing. Could be dumb luck. ;-> (Could be my efforts towards awareness of social nuance paying off, and kinaesthetic awareness.)
Mom was widowed when I was 10, and I’d like to think one of the extremely few compensations was helping see the world through her and my sister’s eyes.
Phil Sandifer on August 21, 2016 at 9:47 am said:
The one proposal that would allow Adminsitrators to use any subjective judgement (Additional Finalists) was killed at the Prelimininary Business Meeting. That was the mildest sort of Administrative interference in the shortlists, and the meeting rejected it. Do you really think they would stand for a proposal that says “Administrators! See Bad Man! Hit Bad Man With Stick!”
Phil Sandifer on August 21, 2016 at 9:51 am said:
It’s unlikely that a proposal that reads, “Any finalist that Phil Sandifer decides is on a slate shall be disqualified” would get much traction.
What you consider cut-and-dried is not. What about the “human shields” on this year’s RP slate?
3SV allows the members to collectively decide what they think a slate is.
rcade on August 21, 2016 at 10:23 am said:
Except that is not what happened. The Worldcon that year did not disqualify ballots. They counted them all. But in the category (and the suspect ballots bullet-voted one person in one category), the Committee unilaterally added an extra finalist, taking the next-highest-placing nominee. The reason this is not obvious is that the “slated” finalist withdrew before the ballot was issued, making the issue moot at the time. This was what gave me the idea for “Additional Finalists.” But as I said above, the members rejected even that relatively mild form of Administrator intervention.
Andrew M on August 21, 2016 at 11:46 am said:
Well, assuming it’s ratified next year, we’ve effectively moved the start of nominations to the begining of the year by changing the must-join-Worldcon-by deadline to the end of the previous year instead of the end of January. The legislation does not give specific dates for each phase of the voting. The current Constitution doesn’t do that, either. It’s left of the Administering Worldcon. I personally figured that the Qualifying Round would last from six to eight weeks. But it’s less time carved out of the entire process than you think. Currently, several weeks pass after nominations close and the final ballot is announced. During that time, the Administrators have to try and track down the potential finalists, check their eligibility, and give them a chance to decline the slot. Under 3SV, the Admins can start doing that when the Qualifying Ballot appears. This means we probably can announce the final ballot about a week after the close of the Qualifying Round.
Dave McCarty, speaking in favor of 3SV, said he assumed this was an unintentional feature, but I assured him (and would have assured the membership had I had an opportunity to debate) that this was definitely intentional. 3SV triples the number of potential finalists, but “crowd-sources” the eligibility and contact checking.
Bartimaeus on August 21, 2016 at 12:42 pm said:
It’s going to take a while. The Secretary has some other commitments. She’ll be working with the other officers and the Nitpicking & Flyspecking Committee to make sure we have it right. When it’s done, it will be published on wsfs.org. I’d be surprised if we have anything until late September at best.
rcade on August 21, 2016 at 12:53 pm said:
But valid ballots cast by individual natural persons who have valid voting rights are not “tampered ballots,” even if they all vote in ways that you find objectionable.
John Mark Ockerbloom on August 21, 2016 at 2:00 pm said:
Yes. I’d write a longer summary, but I’m still traveling home and won’t be home until next week — and I still have to go back to my Day Jobbe.
Kevin Hogan on August 21, 2016 at 9:36 pm said:
It’s not that easy even when you’re there and you’re good at it, as I am.
Should there ever be traction for remote participation or proxy voting, I’m going to push very hard for us to give up on direct democracy and start electing representatives to the Council of WSFS of around 120 people or so, which would meet in person at Worldcon.
I did try to get a system installed that allowed the non-attending members to have some voice in the process, but the meeting rejected its ratification last year in Spokane.
Everyone: If you don’t think the current rules do what you think they should do, write to me with what change you want and I’ll draft it for you. If you’re a member of next year’s Worldcon (even if you don’t attend) and can get at least one other member’s support, your proposal can be put before the members who do attend the meeting. But don’t expect them to necessarily want to do what you want them to do.
Thanks, Kevin!
Thanks Kevin. Very clearly explained. I need to get better at that.
@lurkertype, accidental brilliance is my favorite. 😉
@Kurt Busiek – I wish she hadn’t cloaked her comments in such obfuscatory language, but I’m glad she felt able to get up and speak.
Well, I don’t think she can help the obfuscation (I get the impression she means to be a straight shooter but her prose is sometimes nearly as wobbly as Freer’s). And now that I know she was shaky afterwards I feel even worse about not tracking her down to express appreciation.
@Kevin Standlee – It’s not that easy even when you’re there and you’re good at it, as I am.
It isn’t and I agree that you are, which prompts a thought I often had during the business meeting: I’ve used RRoO in multiple organizations, but always with the stricture that nobody spoke more than once until everyone had their say. That doesn’t seem to be the prevailing rule in the business meeting. Is that by design?
This crowdsourcing-eligibility people keep throwing at 3SV makes me a bit nervous. There’s plenty of incorrect info about people/works out there, and lots of confused people who don’t know the rules (despite the great site that has them) but think they do. Witness the discussions about Bujold’s “Red Queen” book here. I’d rather people use 3SV for removing griefer stuff (autocorrect: briefer stuff), its original purpose, methinks – not thinking they’re suddenly eligibility experts.
Yeah, I know – no way to control how people use something (one of the things I never liked about 3SV). 😉 We’ll see how it goes, if it gets ratified. The thresholds for removing something via 3SV will probably make my concerns totally moot anyway, I suppose.
The idea of crowdsourcing eligibility is not that people will vote down works they think are ineligible, it’s that they’ll notify administrators if they have reason to believe a work is ineligible. For example, in 2015 ineligible works initially appeared on the final ballot in the short story and pro artist categories; if 3SV had been in effect, this would have been discovered before the final ballot was issued, instead of after, and the administrators could have quietly disqualified them. It’s a intentional side benefit of the proposal, independent of downvoting.
If I gave 100 people the money to buy supporting memberships and instructed them to vote exactly the way I did, I think a Hugo administrator who caught wind of this could throw all 100 votes out on the grounds that it was vote tampering and the membership would support the decision.
Beale is openly instructing people to vote an entire slate in categories and they’re doing it. I see it as a form of tampering.
Banning slates doesn’t ban nominees, it rejects votes. If the human shields are popular with the non-slate portion of the electorate, they’ll make the ballot. Since the only reason they’re called human shields is because they are so obviously popular no one thinks they need bloc voting to rise to the top, that’s the likely result.
Cheryl S. on August 24, 2016 at 9:51 pm said:
It is the rule, and for the most part it was being enforced, but it may have not been obvious why there what appeared to be exceptions.
1. The “one speech per person” rule applies to each new question. The main motion is a question. Every amendment to the motion is a new question. Every debatable motion that adheres to the main motion is a new question.
2. When you stand in debate and ask someone to yield for a question and s/he does so, it doesn’t count as “debate” by you — it counts against that person’s debate time.
3. When you stand in debate when nobody has the floor, ask a question, and then the person of whom you ask the question answers it, it counts as your debate, not that person’s. You have yielded to that person, even though s/he may have already spoken.
There are also special cases, like the two minutes I got for a Q&A on the Defining North America question. Technically I was the recognized speaker, and each of the people asking questions was using my debate time.
As near as I could tell, there were no significant cases of the same person being recognized to speak twice to the same question, but there were a lot of new questions that each carried its own debate clock. The “only one speech” rule doesn’t mean “you only get to speak once a day until everyone else has had a chance.”
Kendall on August 25, 2016 at 12:22 am said:
And this is worse than having a handful of people who may not know the work at all?
An example of how crowdsourcing helps is the cut-and-paste error that put two variations of Coode Street Podcast on this year’s long list, which would have been the original Qualifying list. This sort of thing would be caught almost immediately and fixed quickly.
I expect that they will. Most of the people assuming that thousands of people will be downvoting everythign in sight have never actually studied what percentage of the membership participates and also significantly overestimates the number of griefers.
rcade on August 25, 2016 at 5:46 am said:
It seems clear to me that you think that it’s a cut-and-dried, easy question to be able to look at each individual ballot and decide whether that person should be allowed to vote. It’s not. But if you’re convinced it’s that easy, you should try and convince a Worldcon to appoint you as the Hugo Administrator so that you personally get to be the gatekeeper, and that you personally get to decide whose votes should count and whose should not.
The reason I like 3SV is that it allows you to decide which nominees that you think are “slate” nominees, and it allows me to make the same decision (which may be different than yours) and it allows every other member to make that same decision for him or herself, with a supermajority of those members participating getting to make the final decision. It does not put the decision in the hands of a single person who is convinced that s/he knows better than all of the other members about whose ballots should count and which nominees should be finalists.
Well, assuming it’s ratified next year, we’ve effectively moved the start of nominations to the begining of the year by changing the must-join-Worldcon-by deadline to the end of the previous year instead of the end of January.
Well, OK, that helps, but I don’t think it fully answers the problem. The real question is not how long the period is during which we can send in nominations, but how long the period is between the end of eligibility and the close of nominations – the period during which we can think about what to nominate and read likely candidates, with full information, knowing what are seen as the most significant works of the year.
Kevin:
The reason I like 3SV is that it allows you to decide which nominees that you think are “slate” nominees, and it allows me to make the same decision (which may be different than yours) and it allows every other member to make that same decision for him or herself, with a supermajority of those members participating getting to make the final decision.
Does this mean, then, that you do see the downvoting stage as aimed at excluding slate candidates generally? Many people, commenting on it, have insisted that its only purpose is to exclude abuse.
rcade: If you are suggesting that current rules allow administrators to throw out ballots, I certainly don’t agree with that. I’m fairly sure Phil Sandifer’s original comment that provoked this debate was suggesting that a new rule be made. I, too, am not exactly suggesting it, but saying it would be a good thing if it could be done.
It’s clear, from what people have said, that such a rule would be unacceptable unless it gave a rigorous definition of a slate. It’s also clear that we currently don’t have a rigorous definition of a slate. It would require work. I don’t think the fact we don’t have it currently means we can’t work on it.
rcade:
Your logic is broken; telling someone how to vote is not giving them the money to buy a membership. And there’s no proof this is happening; I’ve speculated elsewhere that VD has enough money to do what he wants with Castalia rather than living off it, but that’s (a) different and (b) speculation. I admit that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but I can’t imagine hundreds of money orders — or charges to the same card (few cards?) going through without somebody noticing them, even given the inexperience of the last two concoms, given the general-if-not-fully-accurate knowledge of 1984 and 1989. And my own estimate, based on experience, differs from yours as to whether fandom at large would approve tossing ballots even in your first case.
@rcade
I again ask for a definition of a slate submitted ballot.
How many items on it much match other submitted ballots? 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%? Must they match in 1 category or multiple categories? If multiple categories how many? How close do they need to match a published slate (see previous questions)?
If this is so simple why hasn’t a single person been able to provide a definition for a slate during this thread or any of the multiple threads we’ve had on the topic? Sandier hasn’t offered one. You haven’t offered one. It should be easy given how many time people asking for the admins to throw out slates claim it’s easy for them to tell which ballots are slates.
Do some heavy lifting here. Stop claiming others should know something if you can’t define it.
I’ve never said it would be simple, so I’m surprised that is your perception.
As a programmer, I think an algorithm could analyze all nominating votes cast and show which ones were voting a slate and which ones were individuals casting votes based on their own preferences. Bruce Schneir calls it a clustering problem that is solvable.
But even if we’re just talking about human inspection, there’s a Hugo arsonist who tells us each year what’s on his slate. The Hugo team could privately decide, before receiving a single vote, that if a vote contains 4 or more slate nominees in a category in 6 or more categories, that’s bloc voting. Then when nominations were announced, they could share the number of ballots they ignored and the criteria they used. The criteria could be adjusted each year, to prevent slaters from gaming it.
I will be told this idea is not politically tenable. I agree. But it’s doable.
I wasn’t prepared to run for the job this year, because I lack experience, skills and any discernible support, but with your endorsement I may have to give it more consideration.
I like 3SV too. If it passes again next year and it solves the problem, hooray! But I fear that like EPH, it will do less in practice than we thought it would, and it will take a year to learn this. I’m bummed that we’re taking so long to engineer a solution while the fire rages.
This is our club. Members overwhelmingly agree that bloc voting sucks and we don’t want it. I think we underestimate the cost of proceeding so slowly to stop it.
There’s a person who would have been on the Hugo ballot the last two years, based on the longlist and bloc vote estimates. She has never been on the ballot before. This would have been a huge honor to her.
Here’s how she feels after the Hugos this year:
There’s no guarantee she’ll ever make a ballot. This could have been her only chance. The longlist shows other people experiencing the same unhappy exclusion.
How many years do we deny ourselves the ability to honor the people we collectively admire for excellence, hurting those people and the esteem of our awards?
I wasn’t alleging that anyone is buying people memberships. I was describing why I think two scenarios are similar and I consider both vote tampering.
True. But there are debit cards these days that can be bought with cash and no ID check. The off-the-grid types like them for the times they have to shop online.
With these cards, someone could buy 100 memberships and it would be hard to detect. I bought one of these cards from a large mall chain. I paid cash and was not asked for identification. The card referred me to a website where I could put any name and address on the card. There was no verification.
Perhaps a person did in this exact discussion and you overlooked it.
@rcade The Hugo administrator could privately define, before nominations begin, a pattern of lockstep voting that would be considered a slate. Example: If a nominating ballot contains the same 4 nominees in a category as over 10% of other ballots, in 3 or more categories, that ballot will not be counted.
This is leave it to the admins which is not defining a slate it’s passing the work off to someone else.
ETA: When I said: Stop claiming others should know something if you can’t define it. I meant don’t leave it to the admins – sorry for being ambiguous.
How is “choosing the same four nominees in a category as over 10% of other ballots cast, in three or more categories” not an attempted definition of a slate?
I don’t understand the argument that it is not knowable when a ballot has been cast by voting a slate. Do you really think that if we were sitting down counting Hugo ballots together by hand, we wouldn’t be able to tell which ones had voted for a slate — even if we never saw Beale’s slate?
@rcade choosing the same four nominees in a category as over 10% of other ballots cast, in three or more categories
Because you weren’t proposing it by itself as a slate definition but as an example? Words have meanings. 😉
This might work against RPs. I don’t think it would have worked against the SP1-3.
@Steven desJardins
The idea of crowdsourcing eligibility is not that people will vote down works they think are ineligible, it’s that they’ll notify administrators if they have reason to believe a work is ineligible.
Which has already been happening to a small extent. Here I noted that “Darker than you Think” was too big for its retro-Hugo category; I sent an email about it to the Hugo Administrators, and it was removed from the ballot. Possibly other people also alerted them; I don’t know — the point being that the crowd evaluated it. (Unfortunately, this all happened too late for another work to replace it.)
Because you weren’t proposing it by itself as a slate definition but as an example?
rcade: I read your words as an example of a slate definition.
OK, we have a definition.
Clearly such a definition cannot work against every hi-jacking attempt. Most obviously, it would not work against Black Genesis, which, being a single work, is not a slate in an electoral-theory sense. But EPH and other voting-system reforms wouldn’t work against that either. From the point of view of someone simply looking at the votes, it would not stand out at all (unless its voters voted for nothing else, in which case EPH might actually enhance the value of their votes).
SP1 only offered one candidate in every category, except Long Form Editor – so again not a slate in an electoral-theory sense. SP2 mostly offered two, so only marginally a slate. SP3 tried for sweeps (though not everywhere); it is true that some supporters of that campaign did actually treat it as a recommendation list, so might not be caught by this definition, but some would be.
I think in the cases where this method would not work, reformed voting systems would not work either. A ‘slate’ with only one work in each category would not look different from ordinary voting. A bloc vote in voting-theory sense exists when everyone who votes for A also votes for B: there can’t be a bloc of people who just vote for A. In another sense there may be a bloc of voters for A, i.e. a group of people who are committed to voting for A independently of quality; but that’s a matter of intention, which no formal system can measure.
rcade, Hugo admins don’t want to toss ballots. They’ll go to great lengths to find out what people intended. Attempts at stuffing the ballot box aren’t usually as obvious as the puppies have been.
@Andrew M
A ‘slate’ with only one work in each category would not look different from ordinary voting.
I think it would stand out, though. Not only because of the oddity of ballots with votes for only one work per category, but also because of the correlation between consistently voting for “A” in short-story, and “B” in novella, and “C” in graphic story.
You just need to look at correlations between categories, rather than just within categories.
@P J Evans
@rcade would like to be a Hugo Admin and is in favor of tossing ballots.
There’s no chance I will be a Hugo administrator. I was making a joke to Kevin.
Bill: Well yes, if the slaters voted for nothing else, then their votes would stand out, but of course they don’t have to do that; they can vote the slate and then freely pick other things.
But I really meant it would not look different from the point of view of the voting algorithm. So while rcade’s proposal would not catch SP1, neither would EPH, which would find the distribution of votes in each category perfectly normal. (If they did only vote for one thing in each category, EPH might in some circumstances actually help them.)
I still think that a slate of one work per category is detectable, even if there are four other random votes in each of the categories.
If a group of ballots has [best related work = SJWs Always Lie] AND [best graphic story = Full Frontal Nerdity] AND [best short story = Space Raptor Butt Invasion] AND [best novellete = Obits], then I feel pretty confident that the best novel entries will all include the same RP work. Each ballot may also contain four other randomly (or not-randomly) distributed works in each category, but they still have enough in common with each other that they can be spotted as slate ballots.
Those ballots are detectable from correlation between categories. What to do with them is another story.
Andrew M on August 25, 2016 at 7:24 am said:
I think people should down-vote any work they would vote below No Award, for whatever reason. How could we possibly legislate your reason for doing so?
I had a conversation with someone at Worldcon this year who detests Doctor Who and votes it below No Award every year. He would downvote every DW episode that’s on the Qualifying Ballot. Fine by me. If a 3/5 supermajority agrees with him (20% of the eligible members of the current Worldcon voting), then all of the DW episodes will be knocked off the ballot preemptively. However, I really doubt this will happen.
I am interested in likely outcomes, not technically possible but unlikely ones.
While it i would be annoying to have coordinated bullet nominating, it would presumably mean slaters concentrating to get a single nominee onto each category of the ballot.
Which, if they constituted 20% of nominators, is about what is to be expected.
The coordinating part is unfortunate, but no one is saying people shouldn’t have a fair share of the ballot.
As long as they weren’t trying to place an outright griefer, I’m not sure what could, or even should, be done to prevent it.
@Steven desJardins: Ah, okay, that makes a ton more sense. More time for a much larger group to notify admins of potential issues. Whew! I really did think people meant folks would be downvoting stuff they thought was ineligible. ::blush:: I’m glad I misunderstood.
Apologies if this has been answered already, but how is the number of eligible members determined for the 20% rule in 3SV? Is it the number of total nominators in that category that year?
Rcade, not all nominators can vote. (That may be part of what caused the Puppy die-off in voting this year.) I assume it’s the number of people with valid voting memberships for that year, by the cutoff deadline. I welcome correction, of course.
Kevin::
I think people should down-vote any work they would vote below No Award, for whatever reason. How could we possibly legislate your reason for doing so?
Well, Jameson Quinn has proposed that we do so, though only in an advisory way. But the question I had in mind is not ‘how should individuals use this provision?’ – obviously they can use it how they like – but ‘why is it thought desirable that this provision should exist in the first place?’.
Some people think it is desirable because it will help us deal with abuse. I agree that it will do that.
Other people think it is desirable because it will, more generally, help us deal with slates. I don’t think it will, first because it’s clear that members of Worldcon don’t want to no-award every slate candidate, and second because with some things people would want to no-award, they can only do so after taking the time to read them
Kendall: I’m sure people will be downvoting stuff they think is ineligible. As Kevin says, we can’t legislate the basis on which they will vote,
rcade on August 26, 2016 at 4:47 am said:
It uses exactly the same language as the wording for determining the people who can vote on on the final ballot. Therefore, it is 20% of the voting members of the current Worldcon. It does not include members of any other Worldcon other than the current one. It does not include members of the previous Worldcon. It does not include members of the following year’s Worldcon.
The exact wording is “only WSFS members may vote at this stage.” Members of the previous and following year’s Worldcons are not WSFS members. They are former and/or future WSFS members who have been extended nominating, and only nominating, privileges for one specific vote.
Members of the previous/following Worldcons cannot vote on the Final Ballot.
Members of the previous/following Worldcons cannot vote on Site Selection.
Members of the previous/following Worldcons cannot participate in the WSFS Business Meeting.
The only thing that members of the previous/following Worldcons can do is participate in the Nominating Round of the Hugo Awards. They are excluded from everything else.
(And if you say, “But what if they are members of the current Worldcon?” the answer is, “Of course any member of the current Worldcon has all of the rights of a WSFS member. But they get those rights as a member of the current Worldcon, not as a former/future member.”)
The proposal itself was published two weeks before Worldcon in the 2016 WSFS Business Meeting Agenda, starting on page 12.
Andrew M on August 26, 2016 at 7:18 am said:
It comes down to what you personally think is a “slate” candidate. You have your own definition, and your own sense of what is right and proper when it comes to dealing with them. Possibly you think that Neil Gaiman or Mike Glyer should have been automatically eliminated by Strong Man With Stick because they were on a “slate” as you defined it. Thus 3SV allows you to make that sort of call for yourself. Other members will have a different opinion and can vote that opinion.
There were 10,350 Worldcon members for Sasquan in 2015, per Wikipedia.
All of those members were eligible to nominate in 2016, as were new members who joined for MidAmeriCon II. If 1,500 members were new in 2016 (just a hypothetical guess), that would mean a pool of 11,850 eligible voters.
If I’m understanding 3SV correctly, if the rule was in place this year and 11,850 members were eligible to vote, 2,370 reject votes (20% of 11,850) would have been required to keep a work off the ballot at the long list stage. (Reject votes must be at least the greater of 600 or 20% of eligible voters.)
5 of 17 categories in 2016 had at least 2,370 nominating ballots cast.
8 of 17 categories in 2016 had at least 2,370 final vote ballots cast.
Is 20% too high to reach?
Rcade, your figures are in error, because members of Sasquan were not VOTING members of MidAmericon, unless they bought a MidAmericon membership. Your hypothetical pool of 11,850 are of NOMINATORS, not VOTERS. (The nominating pool is always larger than the voting pool, because it includes members of the previous Worldcon.)
According to MidAmericon’s home page, they had 7338 total attending and supporting members. That is the total number in the voting pool. So 20% of that number is 1468 people.
1545 voted No Award in Novelette, suggesting that one or more of the bottom nominees would have been voted off the island. 1508 in Short Story. 1872 in Best Related work….
Thanks. My response is here in the more recent thread.
It comes down to what you personally think is a “slate” candidate.
You are assuming here that if you do think something is a slate candidate, you will want to vote it down. That is what I am questioning.
rcade, per this message:
More people vote in the final stage than the nominating stage. What percentage of No Awarders will vote in the qualifying stage? I haven’t tried to figure that out.
It’s hard to nominate; it’s easy to vote from a small selection. (Nominating is like voting from a HUGE selection.) I’m not at all surprised that there are more voters than nominators, despite the fact that the nominating pool is probably close to twice as large as the voting pool.
I think anyone motivated enough to actually vote No Award in the voting stage is likely to vote in the pre-screen stage, but that’s just an assumption. We’ll see what happens….