By Kevin Standlee: In light of the revelation that modeling of E Pluribus Hugo does not result in quite the “magic bullet” that some may have hoped for, we may need to consider other changes to the Hugo Award voting system to deal with bad actors deliberately setting themselves against the wishes of the majority of the voting members of the World Science Fiction Society. Over the past few weeks, I have written up descriptions of three different proposals that attempt to deal with bad actors in different ways, and to make it more likely that the results of the Hugo Awards represent the wishes of the majority of the participating members, without the members having to resort to the 16-ton anvil that is No Award.
All of the proposals below are compatible with either of the proposals up for ratification this year (EPH and 4/6). They are not necessarily compatible with each other. None of them require a Very Strong Administrator picking and choosing individual members’ ballots or disqualifying individual finalists on what I call “ideological” grounds. All of them aim to give the majority of the members a strong voice in picking the Hugo Awards.
In this overview, try not to get too deeply bogged down in specific details. For example, all three proposal refer to the “Top 15.” This is a reference to the “long list” currently defined in the WSFS constitution thusly:
3.11.4: The complete numerical vote totals, including all preliminary tallies for first, second, . . . places, shall be made public by the Worldcon Committee within ninety (90) days after the Worldcon. During the same period the nomination voting totals shall also be published, including in each category the vote counts for at least the fifteen highest vote-getters and any other candidate receiving a number of votes equal to at least five percent (5%) of the nomination ballots cast in that category, but not including any candidate receiving fewer than five votes.
Therefore, the “top 15” can be defined in different ways, and there’s a reasonable argument to be made for many of them. Don’t get too tangled up in specifics. These proposals have general principles, and if you’re agreeable to the general idea of any of them, then we can discuss the specific values for some of the blank spots in them.
In the list below, the links lead to my LiveJournal where each proposal is listed in more detail.
3-Stage Voting (3SV) adds a new round of voting to the Hugo Award process, called “semi-finals,” between the existing nominating ballot and the existing final ballot. In 3SV, the top 15 nominees (including any ties, and see the warning about specifics above) are listed in a way that doesn’t show how many nominations they received. The members (supporting and attending) of the current Worldcon (not the previous and following Worldcons) are presented with this list, with a question on each of the fifteen semi-finalists in each category: “Is this work worthy of being on the Final Hugo Award Ballot?” with the choices being YES, NO, and ABSTAIN.
If a sufficient quorum (which is why counting explicit abstentions is important) votes, and if a sufficient number vote NO, that semi-finalist is disqualified from further consideration. As currently proposed, the necessary NO vote is “more NO than YES votes,” but the exact amount needed to disqualify is negotiable. Remember, even if every vote is NO, if a quorum (minimum number of voters) doesn’t participate, the work cannot be disqualified. (This makes it difficult for a small group to campaign against a work.)
At the end of the semi-final round, any works disqualified by the members, withdrawn by the nominees, or disqualified by the Committee on technical grounds is out of the running. From among the remaining semi-finalists, the five that got the most votes in the nominating phase become the finalists, and the final ballot continues as it currently does. Note that in this case it doesn’t matter how many YES votes a semi-finalist got, only that it didn’t get a negative majority.
3SV effectively moves the votes on NO AWARD to the semi-finals, although it would remain a candidate on the final ballot. It allows the members of the current Worldcon (the ones who will be voting on the final ballot) to decide in advance which works they think deserve to be on the final ballot. It does this at a price, however, and that price is to carve 6-8 weeks out of an already relatively crowded schedule. The proposal moves the deadline by which you have to be a member in order to nominate up by a month, and in practice would require the nominating deadline to be earlier in the year.
Another drawback of 3SV is that it triples the number of nominees that the Worldcon Committee (the Hugo Award Administrators) need to vet and contact. However, as a trade-off, it gives the administrator roughly three times as much time to do this contact work, and makes the vetting and contacting process public. That is because the Administrator would not need to contact semi-finalists in advance of announcing the “longlist” of semi-finalists. While the semi-final ballot runs, the Administrator would be contacting semi-finalists to give them an opportunity to withdraw from consideration in the final ballot. Administrators could put out a public appeal if they are unable to contact a given semi-finalist. In addition, the Administrator can do eligibility confirmation in public, with the help of the many other people who will undoubtedly be checking over the list and asking questions. Should a semi-finalist be disqualified on technical grounds, the semi-finalist would not be replaced on the semi-final ballot. Ineligible works show up on the existing Top 15 lists now, and the semi-final round would be too short to allow for replacing longlist slots.
An incidental feature of 3SV is that the finalists would not know they’d made the final ballot until the shortlist was announced. They’d know they were semi-finalists, and during the semi-finals they would have had time to decline if they so choose, but it would be impossible for them to leak being a finalist because they would not know it themselves.
Additional drawbacks to 3SV include the fact that it is explicitly negative. It is a place where you vote against things. Some people are philosophically opposed to “down-voting” works. Furthermore, should the known bad actors stop trying to game the system, there is little need for this semi-final round, and you might find people not even bothering to participate in it, which might result in complaints that we’d added complexity and expense for no obvious reason.
3SV is a “vote against stuff” system. An alternative to it was the second proposal.
Proposal 2: Double Nominations with Approval Voting
Double Nominations with Approval Voting (DN/AV, sometimes just DN) is similar to 3-Stage Voting, in that there would be a semi-final round with the Top 15 (see warning at the beginning of the article) nominees listed in an order that would not reveal how many nominations they received. Only members (attending and supporting) of the current Worldcon would vote at this stage. But instead of voting against semi-finalists as you do in 3SV, you would vote for those semi-finalists who you think deserve to be on the final ballot. You could vote for one or all of the semi-finalists. The version as currently proposed included a single write-in slot as well, primarily as a safety valve. In this case, the number of votes a semi-finalist gets here is critical, because only the top five would continue to the finals.
In 3SV, the number of YES votes doesn’t matter as long as there are fewer NO votes (or insufficient ballots cast to qualify the election at all). The relative number of YES votes doesn’t matter as long as the semi-finalist isn’t disqualified, because it’s the original nominating ballot count that sends works on to the final round if they survive the weeding-out process of 3SV’s downvotes. However, in DN/AV, the five works with the most votes in the semi-final round go on to the final ballot, and the number of nominating ballots cast to get the works onto the longlist is irrelevant. Some have called for nominating counts to be used as a tie-breaker, as they envision a 15-way tie for the final ballot. I personally think this unlikely, and there have been as many as eight finalists on a Hugo ballot due to ties for the final position, so I think we could live without a tie-breaker.
All of the extra administrative issues of 3SV are shared by DN/AV, so I won’t go over them again here.
DN/AV eliminates the “negative” aspect of 3SV, in that you vote for semi-finalists, not against them.
Some have suggested that there’s an implication that “you need to have read all of the semi-finalists in order to vote on this ballot,” although I don’t think that is true in either case. DN/AV is a second nominating round. Just as the current nominating ballot makes no pretense that you should have read everything published last year, DN/AV doesn’t expect voters to have read all fifteen semi-finalists, but instead to pick those that the voters think worth considering on the final ballot, knowing that only the top five will appear there.
The biggest advantage to either 3SV or DN/AV is that they put the decision of “what to have on the final ballot” in the hand of the members who will be voting on that final ballot, and that the majority will of those voters will prevail. Neither system is particularly susceptible to gaming by small minorities. The biggest drawback to either of the first two proposals is that they add an additional round of voting, with administrative overhead and complexity.
Some people have asserted, with various degrees of strength, that the Committee (Hugo Award Administrators) should simply ignore “slate voters” or disqualify “obvious slate-generated finalists.” In my opinion, such proposals are hugely problematical, in that they give Administrators authority they have never had in the entire history of the Hugo Awards. However, there is one historical precedent to which we can look when a group of bad actors appears to have forced a work onto the ballot, and the Worldcon Committee tried to ameliorate the action without actually disqualifying anyone. We’ll consider this in the final proposal.
In 1989, the Hugo Award Administrator noticed an odd situation, where a set of nominating ballots arrived in close order with a single nomination cast in a single category. This was enough to place a finalist on the ballot that seemed unusual to anyone who had been watching the kinds of things that had made the shortlist in recent years. The ballots all having included membership payments in the form of consecutively numbered money orders further raised suspicions. According to the coverage of the situation in File 770 at the time, the 1989 Worldcon committee said in a statement at the time that they didn’t do any investigation, but that one person wrote to the committee to inquire why he had a membership when he hadn’t paid for it. (After they made a public statement, some fans contacted the committee claiming to have cast these votes with innocent intent.) In any event, there has always been a strong ethos in the Hugo Awards to allow the membership to speak, not a small committee. On the other hand, this case seemed to be doing someone out of a Hugo Award finalist slot unfairly. The Committee took the unprecedented step of adding the sixth-place nominee to the shortlist. Not too long thereafter, one of the six finalists (the one that seemed to be odd compared to the others) withdrew. There is no evidence or suggestion that the finalist who withdrew had anything to do with the string of bullet-voted ballots. At most, this was a case of enthusiasts with more money than common sense or ethics.
The final proposal that I’ve written up would explicitly authorize the Worldcon Committee (in practice, the Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee set up by the Worldcon Committee) to take the action that the 1989 Worldcon did whenever they think that there was a pattern of unethical voting in the nominating round. The Committee would be authorized to add up to two additional finalists from among the Top 15. They would not reveal which finalists they added until after the Hugo Awards ceremony, when it would be included in the post-ceremony detailed results.
I have no expectation that the current people who have typically been part of the Hugo Administration Subcommittee would be the ones who would make the actual Plus 2 decisions. I expect that any sensible Worldcon Committee would recruit additional Administrators for their literary judgement, just as the World Fantasy Award does. Any Administrator, no matter whether they were recruited for computer skills, literary skills, or public relations skills, would be ineligible for that year’s Award just as the current Administrators are.
Should the Administrators determine that there was no need to do so, they could choose to not add additional finalists. Thus, if known Bad Actors desist from their wrecking ways, the Administrators could simply continue running things as we have done in the past, leaving it up to the five highest pluralities of nominations. This would simplify administration and require relatively little change.
This proposal allows the Committee to pull from the Top 15, rather than simply the next two finishers in the nominations, to minimize multiple-slating attacks on the system that would try to dominate the top seven rather than the top five positions. While 20% of the electorate has been able to dominate the first five positions relatively easily, it seems unlikely that such a small group could dominate the top fifteen unless their voting power grew to a majority of the entire electorate. Inasmuch as solutions that represent a majority of the electorate (even if you personally dislike the result) are not contrary to democratic process, there is nothing in this proposal that tries to “defend against it.” As I’ve said above and will continue to say, if you can command a majority of the voters, you get your way, even if I don’t like it. It is minorities dominating the process that troubles me.
Note that there’s nothing magic about adding two additional works. It could be one or more. The exact value is debatable. However, consider that we do hope that most people read all or most of the finalists, and therefore making the shortlist too long works against any good you might get from adding (say) five extra works to the ballot.
Broadly speaking, Plus Two is compatible with either (but not both) 3SV and DN/AV. That is, this proposal can be considered separately from either 3SV or DN/AV, whereas the first two proposals above are antithetical to each other, and only one of them could be reasonably considered at a time.
The biggest advantage of Plus Two is that it’s relatively simple, does not add a lot of administrative overhead, and allows the existing two-stage process to stay in place, with only a relatively minor change of adding works to the final ballot. It also adds the “human judgement element” that it appears that many people seem to think is necessary to combat bad-faith efforts to sabotage the Awards.
The biggest disadvantage is that it gives Administrators an authority that they’ve never actually had before, and that they have used only once before, without any explicit sanction. Administrators may be reluctant to serve on the Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee if they know that they may be responsible in some way for adding works to the Hugo Award ballot.
Conclusions
There are no “magic bullets” when it comes to tinkering with the Hugo Award rules. None of the proposals here is a perfect fix. Indeed, per Arrow’s Theorem, there is no such thing as a perfect voting system. However, we can try to move things around and minimize unfairness, usually at the expense of additional complexity. The political question then is how much complexity we can tolerate to improve perceived fairness.
The Instant Runoff Voting system that we use on the final ballot is a case of trading complexity (IRV boggles the minds of people who reject anything other than First Past the Post voting) for fairness (IRV usually returns the least-disliked candidate in an election, rather than the one with the largest plurality; in a field of more than two candidates like the Hugo Awards, it usually returns a consensus winner, not just a strong front-runner). Should we decide that the changes we’ve started with E Pluribus Hugo and 4/6 that are up for ratification this year are insufficient to tilt the field back toward perceived fairness, it behooves the members of WSFS meeting in Kansas City this summer to consider additional changes now, not later.
WSFS rules are intentionally complicated to change, in order to prevent concerns of a day or even of a single year to overwhelm the process. However, that doesn’t mean that we cannot start queuing up additional changes now while we continue to monitor how things proceed, in order to protect our own longer term interests.
I expect at least one of the proposals outlined here to be on the agenda of this year’s WSFS Business Meeting. We might even have all three of them.
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The WSFS Constitution gives three groups the right to vote to select the Hugo Final Ballot. This Worldcon, plus the members from last year and those from next year.
You propose to disenfranchise two of those three groups so that they will no longer have the right to vote to select the Hugo Final Ballot.
Also, there is nothing about either DN or 3SV that requires you to include that.
You are doing it specifically because you want to disenfranchise those voters.
Just call it what it is.
Because all we care should about is turning back the barbarians at the gate?
@Greg Hullender
While I believe banning Castalia would be both morally justifiable and morally satisfying, from a practical sense I think it would be futile.
The goals of SP were largely self promotion and log rolling within the SF community. There it might be effective.
The goals of RP are self promotion in an entirely different community. Banning Mr Beale only strengthens his reputation in that community (‘the man so dangerous SJW’s banned him!’). It also does nothing to limit his ability to mount attacks. It only limits his choice of works to attack with. I think the major impact would be giving him a bloody shirt to rally around and incrementally more followers.
Could people stop using Beale as the objective? We are talking about a troll defense which should be able to handle any griefers.
I do not care about Beale. Every individual troll, wether followers of him or not, will make up their own minds.
To make up a system customized specifically for Castalia House will not really do anything in the long run.
@Stoic Cynic
But it takes away his ability to use it to promote works that he was involved with. He has used the “Hugo-Nominated” tag very heavily, and it’s still worth money. It doesn’t stop him from mounting attacks, if he still wants to, but it does stop him from making money off of it.
And who cares if it raises his standing in his community? He’s going to claim victory no matter what happens.
@Greg
The more I consider this, the more I do like the idea of being able to sign up for the current Worldcon after seeing the longlist. But only with the stipulation that you can’t participate in the 2nd round unless you were eligible in the 1st round.
@Hampus Eckerman
Perhaps that’s a mistake, though. Such a thing is proving hard to devise. Maybe we should step back and ask whether something more targeted is a better answer, given that our problem is one single person.
Jim Henley:
I take it you are still considering a method to exclude griefers and not count their nominations? I agree that your proposal would close one supposed problem with such exclusion. And I personally would prefer a direct approach like that rather than various semifinal-based approaches, but my impression is that there’s little support for it.
Greg Hullender:
Variations of this have been mentioned before, but as people have been quick to point out, it is likely to bring out a whack-a-mole process of new websites. While it will remove some of the PR-related incentives for slating, it doesn’t actually prevent the slating.
@Johan P
It all depends on whether you think that would be likely. Personally, I don’t. I think that if you removed the monetary/PR incentives, all the organizational energy would evaporate.
The different approaches aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. Some folks have objected (mildly) that 3SV doesn’t really remove the PR incentive, since people could still call their works “Hugo Semifinalists.” This would fix that if we passed 3SV as well as Banning.
Missed this one:
Assuming you mean the United States that everybody in the world can join, but they only become citizens for one year, and it moves around the world each year so it lets last year’s citizens and next year’s citizens around the world vote too, that’s a terrific analogy.
False.
@Greg Hullender
Raising his profile in that community gets him more followers to attack WorldCon with. It also might get him improved slate discipline. Lastly in that community Banned By WorldCon probably would have more cachet than Hugo nominated. How’s that book banning thing working out for Boston by the way?
Are allowed to participate in the nomination to determine the final ballot. Which gives them the inherent right to participate in determining the final ballot.
Just say: “They have a right to choose the final ballot, but we don’t want them to, so we intend to change the rules so they can’t.” Is that so hard?
@Stoic Cynic
Banning a book is rather different from refusing to consider giving awards to someone who has tried to destroy the awards.
I do not agree on this. Because I don’t want Worldcon to be taken by surprise again in 15 years when another person is angry. And I do believe that other persons could nominate harassmen blogposts and then have Beale pointing to them.
Your idea is more or less ineffectual.
@Greg Hullender
My parallel would be how Banned in Boston became a PR blurb to splash in ad copy and book covers. I suspect Banned by SJW’s could become a parallel for self promotion in the RP community.
Greg,
Write down the objective criteria for what content or personal actions will render a work or a person ineligible for a Hugo Award.
Create a procedure for how the Worldcons should apply it and how (at least, I would suggest) a decision to remove something from the ballot could be challenged.
Put it in the Constitution. Apply it evenhandedly to everyone.
Not even Vox Day could complain about that.
@Stoic Cynic
All 300 of them.
@Johan P:
I think you’re right: there’s no appetite for explicitly banning bad actors and empowering a sub-group of Worldcon that might have a chance of getting inside the OODA Loop of griefing efforts. I do think that’s what it will take, but right now the WSFS and Hugo fandom seem to be insisting on retracing the learning curve of Web 2.0 community management for itself.
@Brian Z
There’s no need to do that. If you’ve caused enough trouble for 2/3 of the business meeting to ban you, that’s sufficient. In the unlikely event that was done unjustly, the next business meeting can undo it.
The world is a messy place, and it is not usually possible to create hard and fast rules that eliminate the need for human judgment. It’s absurd to demand it.
@Greg Hullender:
Preach.
Brian Z on May 22, 2016 at 3:56 am said:
There are at least two that I know of. Which elections are you talking about?
Care to elaborate? I certainly don’t understand what you’re talking about.
If you’re discussing proposals to remove the right of the previous and following years’ members from nominating, well, they are not current WSFS members. WSFS has extended a voting privilege to them, but they aren’t current members of WSFS.
What are you talking about? If you’re talking about any new proposals this year having to be ratified by the members of next year’s Worldcon, well, you’re just stating the obvious, aren’t you?
If you’re talking of proposals to remove voting rights from supporting members, and you think it’s likely to happen, then I think you’ve seriously misread how the Business Meeting attendees behave. Have you ever actually attended a Worldcon? Have you ever actually attended a WSFS Business Meeting? Just because some people propose a change doesn’t mean it becomes part of the Constitution, you know. I’m one of the longest-serving regular business meeting attendees (not the longest) and even proposals I make don’t always pass. (See Popular Ratification.)
They bid. They lost, fair and square. That’s how it works. Brian, I am a director of the non-profit corporation behind one of the bids that lost last year (Montreal) and while I’m sorry we didn’t win, I don’t have the same level of vitriol that you have, and that you have no justification for having. WSFS members vote on where they want their convention to be. If they don’t want to hold it in Japan or China, that’s their right.
Greg Hullender on May 22, 2016 at 6:57 am said:
I think you’re worrying too much. And I don’t like scenarios that allow a single Business Meeting to make those sorts of changes. Meeting packing happens.
You can do this by actually using the last-day WSFS Business Meeting (normally only held in reserve) every year, since the figures would be in the post-Hugo report. Maybe people really enjoy the Business Meeting that much. I’ve always thought it was one of the better kept secrets of Worldcon, but now it’s starting to leak out.
I don’t think you want this. Particularly if Griefers really do manage to sweep every position, which is technically possible, although I think somewhat unlikely unless they really can muster a majority of the entire membership. (As usual, I don’t worry too much about Griefers getting an absolute majority.) We’ve had final ballots with as few as three finalists, and we’ve survived. And if we reject all fifteen semi-finalists, then we just don’t give out the category. If we reject all of the categories, we don’t hold a Hugo Awards ceremony, and Worldcon saves a bunch of money that can be spent on its members in other ways. This is such a low-probability event that I don’t think it worth worrying over.
I think so.
This doesn’t bother me, either, as long as we can pick a specific point in time where we measure the number of members and say “this percentage is necessary to reject a finalist.” I’d rather the number not be a moving target.
Greg Hullender on May 22, 2016 at 7:23 am said:
It would require two separate pieces: A Constitutional amendment authorizing the creation of a Blacklist, and then once that was ratified, the initial placing of works and people on that Blacklist. I would vest the WSFS Mark Protection Committee with the responsibility for maintaining the Blacklist (they’d probably delegate it to the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee, which maintains the web site) because it’s the only permanent organization of WSFS. Not that I think it’s a good idea. Also, I’m sure that Vox would be delighted to be Banned, because he could use it for more publicity and to whip up his Internet Outrage Machine.
Responding to Brian Z again:
You say that WSFS is not a society with annual dues. Well, actually, it is. Membership in the World Science Fiction Society this year is currently $50. To attend the annual convention, you have to be a member and also pay the convention supplement (currently $160). Maybe if you had to send the membership dues to the Home Office in Santa Rosa, California and the convention supplement to Kansas City, this would be more obvious; however, WSFS outsources nearly all of the administration of the society to a new committee every year, and thus the apparent location of the office moves annually. This year, for instance, we’ll vote on whether to give responsibility for running WSFS for 2018 to San José or New Orleans.
@Greg
The main problem is dreck getting on the final ballot. 3SV addresses that.
The secondary problem is slating. We’re trying various ways to make that get less results. We’ve already seen the Sad Puppy slate turn into a recommendation list. (Although, with some individual sad pups going rabid.)
In my opinion, the current slate-maker is not worth any specific consideration.
Greg,
Are you talking about banning a person from a convention?
I thought we were talking about declaring things people put on their nominating ballots ineligible for a Hugo Award.
@Greg Hullender: satisfying though it might be to shout at Beale “You! You’re barred!”, I think that it’s more trouble than it’s worth, politically and procedurally.
Suppose Beale is bitten by a radioactive Ellen Datlow and actually becomes a good editor. Or suppose he is hit by a falling llama and Castalia House passes into other, less contentious, hands. Who decides if some bad actor has reformed enough to be readmitted to consideration? I foresee endless and heated wrangling about points like this, which we can forestall by just, well, not implementing a banning measure. I don’t think the Hugo admins should get involved in personalities, anyway. (If you want to implement a vendetta, leave that to fandom at large – they’re the experts, they’ve been doing it for decades.)
@Jim Henley
I do think, though, that something to that effect should be on the agenda for the Business Meeting this year. We see how a lot of people on File770 object to the idea, but that doesn’t mean the BM will do so. The BM ought to have options available.
Maybe what’s really needed is an emergency committee that can purge bad works, but only algorithmically. It can use its own judgment to decide what “bad” means, but it has to use (and disclose) an algorithm for removing them. So it could use 3SV but adjust the threshold to get the desired result. Or choose between EPH and EPH+ based on the outcome.
It would need to be reauthorized annually, but hopefully that wouldn’t be necessary. (Only if they had to ask for new infrastructure, e.g. a change to the voting UI.)
Maybe the next BM would authorize such a thing. I doesn’t hurt to ask.
@Steve Wright
I see you didn’t actually read the proposal.
@Laura
If 3SV works. I’m worried about the possibility that it does not work. At the earliest, it will be 2018 before we could know whether it will work or not.
How, exactly, is it false? Be specific. Do you make it a habit to go up to various society members and tell them they’re not a society? I belong to the NAR, pay annual dues, and sometimes pay additional money to go to their Annual Meeting, which is held all over the country, run by various NAR subgroups called sections. I do pay the NARAM fees separately, though. Are you going to tell me that the NAR isn’t a society with annual dues? Because, seriously, they’re very similar. WSFS sends me the various Progress Reports and the convention book. NARAM sends me its magazine. I have to pay extra to go to Worldcon. I have to pay extra to launch rockets at NARAM. Both Worldcon and NARAM are being held in Missouri this summer, but alas, they’re a few weeks apart, so I can’t make just the one road trip.
The NAR has juried awards instead of membership-awarded awards, but really, they’re both societies with annual dues, membership of which comes with particular rights and privileges.
@Greg Hullender: I read it. It seems straightforward, simple and effective, on the surface. In practice, I think getting the votes required for either a ban or the rescinding of a ban will be attended by so much Sturm und Drang that it’s not worth doing.
@Greg Hullender
The heck with algorithms. Let’s try this idea: appoint a jury (or the admins) with power to add or remove works from the shortlist (I prefer add only but it doesn’t meet the bar for some folks). Present the two shortlists, pre and post edit, to the membership for an an up or down, A or B, vote on which to proceed to the voting round. Simple, effective, keeps the membership as the ultimate judges, no fancy algorithms to game, limits campaigning for or against individual works, and no stage 2 vote to manage in non slate years. Needs a snappy name though
And for snappy names: GTFO-A/B. Acronyms are cool! 😛
@Greg
Ha! The Business Meeting will probably make the objections here look like a cake-walk! And if you present them with too many options, they might just shoot them all down.
And jury is a hot button word so henceforth it shall be named a moderation panel (or Bob for short).
The Unified Non-binding Committee for Libel Enforcement so ‘Bob’s your UNCLE’? :-p
We are the harassmen / we are the hollow fen / voting together, blog pieces filled with straw?
Kevin,
That do not include non-Members, or restrict which Members may participate? I meant the voting on the Hugo Award final ballot. What did I miss?
No, I meant the times over the past year people wanted to restrict all Hugo voting to attending members. (I would guess you agree that is a bad idea.)
Kevin, you have drafted two proposals, DN and 3SV, which both remove voting rights.
Both remove voting rights to select the Hugo final ballot, disenfranchising two groups, last years WSFS members and next years WSFS members.
There is no technical reason why the proposals require you to do that. You are doing it only because you want to disenfranchise two of the three groups who are eligible to vote to select the Hugo final ballot.
Yes, I can imagine that getting through the Business Meeting. I can imagine hundreds of people filing into the meeting in Kansas City specifically for that, and leaving the room as soon as it passed. I’m not being facetious.
My imagination is more murky picturing the ratification vote in Helsinki. Do you think it might play out differently? Serious question.
No, you misunderstand me. I wasn’t referring to any particular (past or future) bid by the fans in Finland, Japan, etc. I meant that talking about how being a member of WSFS and going to Worldcon every year is a very North American centric concept. And even in North America it is an extremely expensive con and following it around each year is beyond the reach of most fans. For someone, especially on a budget, who might wish to Worldcon when possible, but could only hope to get there very infrequently and that’s if they’re lucky, the chance to join one year and also vote on the final ballot for the next year might be a big deal to them. I’ve heard fans say that it is.
I know your attitude is well then cough up the annual dues, but the picture isn’t that simple.
There is only a superficial resemblance. Nobody pays dues to WSFS. People who have joined a Worldcon become members of it for the year regardless of how they got their Worldcon membership. If it was a clear cut case of being supposed to pay annual dues, they would never have decided to start extending voting rights to last year’s members in the first place.
@greg hullender You ask smart questions. You’ve reminded me of that old saying about locks only keeping out honest people.
@ Will R, I still can’t figure out when they’re talking about banning people, and when they’re talking about controlling what people are allowed to propose to be nominated for an award.
Quick history questions:
1. Since what year have supporting members had nominating and/or voting rights?
2. Since what year has it been possible to nominate for the Hugos online?
Bonus question: Since what year have online nomination forms predominated?
Brian Z That do not include non-Members, or restrict which Members may participate? I meant the voting on the Hugo Award final ballot. What did I miss?
Non-Members have NEVER been allowed to VOTE on any ballot. They can only NOMINATE FOR the ballot.
Not the same thing at all.
Hope this clarifies.
Cassy B: that’s right. The Constitution says only current members have the right to look at the five things chosen by the past members and the current and future members as of earlier that year, and decide which of those five things is most acceptable to them, if any.
Brian Z, and the proposed amendment makes it that current members have the right to look at fifteen things, instead of five.
So what’s your problem?
@Brian Z
This is the sort of dishonest comment that causes people to decline to engage with you. You know very well what I proposed.
Sometimes you actually do raise concerns people should think about, but you’re not doing a good job of that today.
Cassy B: there are two proposed amendments.
One allows the current members to simply discard any of the votes (of the past members and the current and future members as of earlier that year) that they feel like discarding.
One allows the current members to invalidate the five finalists (chosen by the past members and the current and future members as of earlier that year) by switching out the finalists with some of the next ten runners up.
Greg,
I was less clear than you think.
There has been discussion here of banning Vox Day. There has also been discussion of banning people from the convention who wrote the titles or names of works or people that are deemed undesirable on their nomination ballots.
Does ban mean copies of SJWs Always Lie should be banned from the dealer’s room?
Ribbons featuring the words “Castalia House” will be confiscated?
I do think and hope that you personally, Greg, mean that certain works or people should not be considered eligible for a Hugo Award. I still think the way to deal with that is to establish criteria for what is ineligible and a procedure for rejecting the nominee.
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Brian,
I really wish you’d NAMED the systems you’re referring to. Your descriptions don’t match what I’ve been seeing, so I’m responding based on a guess as to the system you might be referring to.
One allows the current members to simply discard any of the votes (of the past members and the current and future members as of earlier that year) that they feel like discarding.
I’ve not heard any discussion of throwing out VOTES. (other than, perhaps, a few blue-sky ideas about throwing out members, which have been pretty much ignored or laughed at or pooh-poohed, but has not gotten any serious traction).
There has been discussion of a preliminary round to allow No-Awarding NOMINATIONS, however. But not a single VOTE would be discarded, as I understand it.
One allows the current members to invalidate the five finalists (chosen by the past members and the current and future members as of earlier that year) by switching out the finalists with some of the next ten runners up.
Making the longlist 15 and allowing a preliminary No Award vote, yes. Do you think that the Hugo voters should have the right to No Award removed?
Update: I have worked out the hitch I had with making graphs, but now I’m trying to make the best graphs possible. I think I’ll have a new post ready by this evening; say, 6pm ET. Mike: will you be available to post it some time after that?
….
What do I think would be an acceptable outcome here, one which would lead to a tapering off of interest in the current griefing efforts and an adequate resistance to future efforts? I think it should include:
-Passing EPH this year. I don’t care about 4/6 or 5/6; either way is OK by me. I think there is a good chance this happens.
-Getting 3SV in the pipeline for next year. I think that the details — quorum, time periods, eligibility, etc. — all have a wide enough acceptable window that it will be easy to get them reasonably right. I expect this will not be a cakewalk, but I expect it will probably pass.
-Getting one or both or the “plusses” (EPH+ or 3SV+1) in the pipeline for next year. Again, there are some subsidiary issues with +1 (eligibility, etc.) but I think if something passes it will be something reasonably well-thought-out. I’d be fine with attaching +1 to 3SV but I’m also fine with separating them and it looks as if the latter plan has more support.
This “at least one plus” is the one I’m currently seeing as the most touch-and-go. Several people have said they’d be willing to give up on +1 in the desire to see 3SV pass. Thus, I think it’s worth making the attempt to pass EPH+ this year. Therefore, I will probably be wanting to attend WorldCon again, and crowdfunding to go there. As with last year, I will (if it comes to this) be crowdfunding as much as possible, and any excess beyond what I raise will go to the Center for Election Science (electology.org). I’ll certainly have more to say about why this is a good cause if and when I set up the campaign.
….
As to Jim Henley’s proposal to lay the legal groundwork for enabling one worldcon to revoke voting rights from a member of the previous one: I think that’s a good idea, but not really a solution to any of the wider problems. It will and should always be a very high bar to show that an individual has violated the code of conduct and should have their rights revoked; simply voting in a certain manner should never become the only measure of such behavior, and so while this is something that might be appropriate for visible ringleaders, it will never deal with the squadrons of followers.
@Brian Z:
The voting on the Campbell Award.
@Brian Z
This has been a very long thread, and lots of ideas have been tossed about. At this point, I’m simply talking about identifying entities who would be banned from eligibility for nomination, as my proposal said explicitly.
In a previous discussion (further back on the thread), I pointed out that a committee could eliminate griefers just by identifying malicious nominations and then cancelling the memberships of everyone who nominated them. I think that was in response to someone looking for a simple way to eliminate griefers, given a short list of malicious nominees. It wasn’t intended as a serious proposal. I probably should have been more clear about that.
I think the only serious proposal on the table now is 3SV, although I think it’s still worth tossing out ideas and seeing if anything else holds water. So far, it looks as though nothing else does.
@Jameson Quinn
Did you get a chance to look at my logic for why EPH would likely prevent griefers from capturing more than 10 of the slots in a 15-element long-list? Yesterday you said you saw a flaw, but you didn’t have time to explain it.