Introduction by Camestros Felapton: Since the release of the 2023 Hugo Award nomination statistics on January 20, there have been a plethora of questions about the awards and the process followed. One of the earliest insights into the data was made in a series of graphs drawn by Heather Rose Jones on her Alpennia (“A Comparison of Hugo Nomination Distribution Statistics”.) The graphs revealed several categories with highly unusual “cliffs” in the number of nominations.
This new report [available here] builds upon that initial analysis and delves further into the unusual features of the 2023 data. By collating data from all of the Hugo nominations from 2017 onward, the report looks at unusual features in the nomination statistics, compares 2023 with previous years in multiple dimensions and looks at additional data such as the recently leaked validation lists.
This report contends that the nomination statistics provided cannot be treated as a reliable presentation of the actual nomination votes by members. The report shows that there are known errors in the listed names of nominees, inconsistencies in the vote totals, inaccuracies in the manner points were calculated in elimination rounds and highly atypical patterns of voting. In particular, there is evidence in the categories of Best Novel and Best Series of a very large number of highly similar votes for the main finalists in these categories, that these votes advantaged English-language works over Chinese-language works and that these votes do not resemble organic voting by members.
The 51-page report can be downloaded from two locations:
File 770: “Charting the Cliff: An Investigation Into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics”
Google Docs: ChartingTheCliff-Hugo2023
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Pulling in two different directions, yes. If everybody had the time and inclination to read everything then a bigger set of finalists is even better (a plus for: promote discovery!) but includes more things most voters won’t vote for (a minus for: don’t include stuff that won’t win).
Without getting the word out to anyone BUT the 700+ people voting for the slate – about 40% of the all the people voting!
But it gets worse!
We don’t know what the split was between voters in China and voters outside of China but 674 people (if we believe the stats) voted for ??-? On the Razor’s Edge in short story (the Chinese nominee with the most nominations). So probably more than 700 Chinese voters. 1847 people nominated in total, so 1100 English-speaking voters as an upper estimate.
So our imaginary slate boosting English-language stories would be about two-thirds of all the Westerners voting! So everybody in Hugo-voting fandom is gaslighting me and has been in on this whole scheme all along. A sensible conclusion 🙂 – come on everybody, confess!
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Brad Templeton, who still can’t spell my name, says:
Indeed, and I was so shattered by this tragic event that I…forgot all about it. Just now, I dug up the Helsinki Hugo statistics report in order to figure out if it really happened. (It did.)
Nevertheless, I think EPH was and is a good thing. The person who got on the ballot instead of me was the beneficiary of a decent-sized group of nominators who really, really wanted to get that one person on the ballot, and who (it looks like, to me) nominated only that one person. The fact that EPH empowers this strategy was endlessly discussed prior to its passage, and the broad consensus was that this is a feature, not a bug. As Vicki Rosenzweig observed above:
And as Camestros said:
A thing Teresa and I learned decades ago — from Ben Yalow, in fact — is that there are no perfect voting systems. Any system you choose will sometimes generate outcomes that seem “off” to some of its participants. So you have to make your choices based on which values are most important to you. Fandom chose a system that’s known to give some advantage to a candidate that gets nominated as their sole choice by a moderate number of people. We made this choice with our eyes open and after a very large amount of discussion of this very issue. Of course our decision can be criticized, and for all I know the 2032 Worldcon will repeal everything about EPH and replace it with a system involving dice and arm-wrestling, because no fannish argument ever ends. But it’s not as if this is an issue that only occurred to us after EPH went into effect.
@rcade: “Dave McCarty has been working as a software developer for 32 years. One of the big mysteries of this scandal is why he would go to all the effort of writing new software to administer the Hugos and then spend so little effort covering his tracks.”
In software, and presumably other fields but I’ve only heard it there, there’s a difference between “32 years of experience” and “1 year of experience, 32 times”, and based on everything else McCarty seems like the kind of guy with the latter.
Yep. Seems to me like all the complaints about EPH boil down to “EPH is working exactly as was always known to be the case, and I have never liked that even before the decision was made, so I’m going to pretend this is new information”.
I wouldn’t draw that conclusion on such limited information. He’s been in software development full time for a long time. My presumption is that he is likely to be competent in that field, though if he actually wrote new software from scratch to run the Hugos when there was well-tested software already available, that is the kind of ego-driven decision that most experienced developers have taught themselves to resist.
As Patrick reminds us, there is no such thing as a perfect voting system. The disadvantages of the system where voters can pick exactly one of N candidates, and whoever gets the most votes wins are well known, but that’s the established system in a lot of places, and changing things takes more energy than leaving them as they are.
There will be a presidential primary in much of the United States ten days from now. Massachusetts has “open” primaries, meaning most registered voters can decide which primary to vote in when we get to the polling place. I’m not the only person I know who is considering asking for a Republican ballot, to vote against Trump, even though we plan to vote for Pres. Biden in November.
I don’t know why Massachusetts does primaries this way, but what I wrote above is practically a textbook example of the arguments against it.
California has a far worse system: we have a “jungle primary” where ALL primary candidates are on the same ballot. Not only is the primary ballot full of junk candidates because it’s easy to qualify, but it’s quite possible for (say) two Democrats to win the primary.
In Michigan, we get one ballot which tells you to vote only 1 party section.
My apologies, Patrick, for accidentally hyphenating you. And it’s good that you felt no affect from missing a nomination that year. Your fine work has given you several nominations, and editors get a shot at it every year, but you must admit that there are others who might be more distressed over having just missed the ballot because of a change in the calculation rules.
A few have pointed out Arrow’s Theorem, and that was actually half my point. No system will be perfect, and for each system the differences will be liked by some and disliked by others. Each nominee brought forward is another eliminated, and some may be cool with it, and others less so, and there is no assurance of which it shall be.
My objections to EPH at the time did include subjective judgments of this. And while there are those who advanced that they felt they liked how it might increase “diversity” there can be no denying that 99.9% of the driving force behind it was to counter the puppies and mitigate slates. There was no sudden movement saying, “We really need to bring nominees onto the ballot that are not often paired with the other popular nominees, let’s make this new counting system.”
My objections — though it is not my goal to revisit that debate — are that algorithmic approaches are not effective in the long term against attackers, and so they don’t justify lots of added complexity. That point I stand behind. And it’s sad that, in spite of all the effort behind it, in the end we got a rogue Hugo admin discarding vast numbers of ballots when in his warped judgement, it didn’t seem to be working.
Side note on Arrow’s theorem: It only says there is no perfect system when there must be one winner, as is the case in political elections. When ties are allowed, there are perfect systems. For example, Condorcet can be perfect (when all voters rank all candidates) but it can generate the result A>B, B>C and C>A. In a Presidential election, that’s failure, but if the system defines that as a tie between A, B and C, it can always generate a correct result.
Hugo nominations have a similar out. If you have a situation which generates a conflict, you can just increase the length of the shortlist. That comes with a cost that people now have more to read to make an informed judgment, but otherwise the cost is very low. With the puppies, the ballots would have been very long that year, but based on the No Award result we got, fans would have voted primarily for the non-slate nominees and the puppies would have been a small footnote in history, or more simply they would not have even tried.
One of the reasons I liked EPH in the first place was that it wasn’t just about mitigating slates. I like it even more now for the ability to clearly see a lot more about the nominations than just what got the most votes. And I like that we didn’t have to change nominations themselves. I really don’t want to have to rank my nominations.
@Madame Hardy
IIRC, it was pushed fore by the GOP when it was proposed. (I voted against it.) But the presidential primary is still by party, so we don’t have to deal with that.
@Brad:
My impression is that even before the Puppies, there were categories (especially Dramatic Presentation, Short Form) that were perceived as being dominated by one or two creators: the “Best Doctor Who” or “Best Joss Whedon” awards – so some folks were wishing for nominees that were not often paired with other popular nominees (even if they weren’t using those words to articulate what they wanted).
@Brad Templeton–In real life EPH has proved very effective against slates, not 100% effective, but nothing will be immune to every ill outcome. Even your “perfect” Condorcet system is, you concede, only perfect if every voter ranks every candidate–a thing that in real life, in regular use, won’t always happen, and indeed is likely to rarely happen.
Nor has anyone claimed that producing a more diverse ballot, by any means other than making it harder (not impossible; just harder) for slates to dominate a ballot, was the point of EPH. It is, however, a thing noted when EPH was under consideration, was fully discussed, and the voters as a whole reached a different conclusion on the positives vs. negatives of that, and the acceptability of it, than you did.
Welcome to democracy, where no one gets everything they want all the time–not even you.
Pretending we were all just too blind to see things your way and vote the way you wanted, or that things that were fully discussed were somehow slipped by us, us not going to help your case.
As for the sad outcome of all that effort being that we got a rogue Hugo administrator…no. Dave McCarty going rogue and tossing out all the rules in favor of what he wanted wasn’t a result of EPH. It would not have been prevented by mot adopting EPH. It was a result of Dave McCarty tossing out the rules and doing things the way he wanted to in order to produce a final ballot he approved of. Let’s not forget that his preferred method of dealing with slates is to simply toss anything he thinks is a slate ballot.
But maybe you think that’s better. I don’t.
Sorry if I implied that McCarty’s actions were a result of EPH. I was actually saying the opposite, that they happened in spite of efforts like EPH.
And I certainly don’t “pretend you are all too blind,” not even remotely. I am just disagreeing. What the majority votes for simply reveals what the majority wanted to vote for, you can still disagree with it.
@Andrew: I know that sentiment existed, my point was simply that this was a side reason people picked EPH from among a number of proposals, not even remotely a core reason for the effort.
But, as you say, this discussion has happened before. The Hugos remain fragile, and in fact this year’s attack is even worse, and came from within.
To get very philosophical… I will admit I do take a different, and perhaps non-democratic view of the Hugos from many others. My view is that the goal of the Hugos is to reveal what we think is the greatest work of the year, not to decide it. In a vote, you decide things. In 2016, the electoral college decided to make Trump President, and thus by definition he was President. Since only a modest fraction of eligible voters participated, the voting process can return a different result than the ideal which might be who most Americans (or most states, through their voters) most wanted for the job.
Most people want the Hugos to be a selection. A given work is given the Hugo award because we voted for it, by definition. There is a subtle difference between that and a different ideal — imagine that some omniscient intelligence could peer in the minds of fans and calculate which book, as a group, they found best. Many might actually agree with that ideal and say that our voting system is just one effort to get that result. Others feel that the journey is the reward, that the idea of voting and choosing and participating in it is the goal or is part of the goal, and the award is a result of that goal.
The difference is, if the voting is the goal, then you focus on it, and whatever you choose is right. If the goal is to get as close to the ideal, then some approaches are actually objectively better at it than others, regardless of what the majority thinks — though we may have no other system of deciding than a majority and so accept that. Arrow’s theorem is in fact about the difference between what voting systems calculate compared to an ideal result, and how they can’t match all the time, unless ties are allowed. (Though some systems are clearly better than others, even if all are flawed.) And right now I would estimate that a larger fraction of fans do think that the journey is the reward here, which is not inconsistent with many principles of fandom, which is at its core a participatory community, and my quest to get closer to the ideal result is a minority view. Both can be right, viewed with their own lens.
However, neither viewpoint wants the process to be fragile and easily broken by attackers and corrupt administrators and repressive host nations, so that remains a discussion still worth having.
I feel that EPH does help us get closer to that elusive ideal result. And our final voting system too.
Worth noting that in the first round Hugo balloting, it’s not even possible for every voter to rank every candidate — no one has a list of all eligible works ahead of time, and there’s certainly no one who’s read them all. So the merits of any system that would require that are pretty much moot.
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Of course not. But there are voting systems where you would rank your particular x number of nominations. I often think when nominating that I’m glad I don’t have to put them in order.
@Laura, indeed; it’s hard enough to put the finalists in order!
I agree with you. That’s why I opposed EPH, which works by weakening your vote for many of the works on your ballot for the sole reason that they happen to appear on the ballot next to some other work that had Tor or similar slate/marketing muscle behind it. I’m told to be “happy” because one of the works I listed “won.” But that winner is always the thing with manufactured buzz that a big publisher campaigned for or put on a secret slate, not the underdog and never the hidden gem. I don’t conisder that happiness. I find it cheap, contrived and unpleasant.
But look what just happened. Even with EPH, a slate overpowered the biggest categories, the ballots were voided, and underneath we find… another slate. EPH failed because everyone started slating harder. The old culture of a group of hardcore fans/pros respecting the process and doing this seriously is gone.
It would do far less damage to the ideals you remember fondly to replace EPH with the Read the Damn Books and Think for Yourself Amendment. “If any set of ballots having identical nominations in 4 or 5 of the spaces equals more than X percent of the total ballots cast, those identical nominations only will be counted as Y fraction of a vote instead of being counted as a full vote.”
I’ve read as much of the analysis as I can, but I don’t where you justify the assertion that you know “1847 people nominated in total”. We have a document trail describing plans to void ballots, and a list of works which must have appeared on those voided ballots. For a slate to overpower the books beneath it, the number of ballots voided would have been much greater than those below. What is your thinking here?
Your assertion that only Western fans could have voted for Western works seems facile. We have evidence of Chinese publishers pushing slates and evidence of a committee linked to a Chinese publisher removing slates. On what basis would you dismiss the plausibility of Chinese voters supporting Western works so many of which were already, or in different stages of preparation to be, published by Chinese publishers?
1847 valid nominating ballots (1843 electronic and 4 paper) were reported as received.
Prove it. With your level of certainty it shouldn’t be a problem.
If you can come up with a convincing story as to why a large number of Chinese voters decided to vote very consistently to ensure that Best Novel and Best Series were dominated by Western works, I’d be interested to hear it. It has one advantage as a theory of explaining why Western fans didn’t hear about this slate.
@Brian Z: I don’t know how you can assert that any voting system has worked or failed when the votes were thrown away before that voting system even started to work.
EPH was designed to limit the effect of large coordinated slates overwhelming the other nominators. We’ve always known this was possible and easy, previously, social pressure kept it mostly in check.
EPH was not designed to prevent Hugo Administrators from throwing out large numbers of nominations and tampering with the results afterwards. Literally no voting system can prevent that.
Abuse of power is hard to combat. Your options are to ensure the dictator is benevolent or require a system of checks and balances. Both have failure mechanisms.
The crux of the issue is that Fandom has operated with a great deal of trust. Admins like Nicholas Whyte (hope I have that right) and John Lorentz (ditto) handled that trust with care. I have a great deal of admiration for Mr. Lorentz in particular, given the (bleep) show he had to deal with, but he and his team stayed fair and accepted the result that, while disgusting, were perfectly legal.. Mr. Whyte’s document detailing every Hugo Administratior’s decision he made is something that all future admins should do.
Dave McCarty abused it. Neither the former nomination method or the current one can fix that.
Camestros Felapton Writes:
Easier to typeset?
@Brian Z–
You have zero evidence for this ridiculous claim. It’s supported only by your unshakable conviction that an honest ballot would be filled with Puppy shit.
“Secret” slates capable of dominating Hugo ballots, or any ballots, don’t exist. It takes too much effort and organization and publicity to do that. No large group can keep a big secret that needs to be spread to as many people as possible in order to work. I mean, have you met human beings?
And what’s your basis for claiming that the buzz books that won got was “artificial”? The fact that you and your best buds, who are obviously the only real fans, didn’t like them?
Produce some evidence that’s actual evidence, and not just you repeating your opinion and dismissing evidence you don’t like.
Lis, I very much agree with your comment. If anything, the puppies showed how much open campaigning needed to occur for a ‘slate’ to work. The closest thing to a ‘secret’ slate that I can think of is the ballot stuffing to get Black Genesis on the ballot, and even that doesn’t really constitute a ‘secret slate.’
Brian Z, I think the thing that keeps getting you in trouble is that you assume the set of values that you think should shape the voting choices of members are somehow universally held and they clearly are not. I don’t think there is anything wrong with arguing that the Hugos should focus on certain aesthetic qualities, but there are going to be people who disagree with you and are going to emphasize other qualities. That’s just part of the process. You constantly shoot yourself in the foot by offending people here by attempting to impose your values on them as a kind of false universal, rather than arguing for those qualities as something they should consider in the future. Also, your two representative figures of the ‘fall’ of the Hugos, John Scalzi and Travis Baldree, are simply popular authors, who are unsurprisingly represented on what is in fact a popular vote. You don’t need secret machinations to understand how they wound up on the ballot.
Brad Templeton, I’ve been listening to quite a bit of The Coode Street Podcast recently and one of the more useful observations made by the two hosts is simply that ‘fandom’ is far more fragmented than it was decades earlier. There is a greater diversity of interests and values than previously and wider array of works to engage with that fragmented community. There was an ability to read the field in the 1950’s that simply no longer exists. There really is no possibility of there being a figure like Heinlein was in the 50’s as a kind of lingua franca of the community. The desire for the award to represent some sense of a unified community’s consensus on the greatest work is simply impossible because there is no consensus on what constitutes greatness. I should note that I don’t even think that the earlier decisions represented your desired goal. At a simple level, they represent what a certain community valued at a certain time. I think that’s deeply interesting, but I don’t think that it can represent anything more than that.
Overall, the focus on EPH really feels like a red herring. The issue at the heart of the debacle around voting was an issue of governance and the lack of checks on the authority of the committee that controlled the vote as well as a lack of transparency. That’s really what needs to be addressed.
I accept your challenge but need a day or two before I can get back to this.
Meanwhile just to volley “convincing” back to your court. Neither Ben Yalow nor Dave McCarty, not even the dreaded CBD, are hell-bent on destroying Worldcon. Everyone has some rational motive. McCarty told Barkley there were two mistakes in the published stats, one that everyone noticed which he blamed on SQL and one that he hadn’t seen anyone mention yet. (He apparently didn’t consider the removal of unknown but apparently huge numbers of “invalid” ballots a mistake, even in hindsight.) What is he referring to, and why would he think everything else is fine?
Commander Jetson finished having her way with Ensign Bob and rolled over. “I need a smoke.”
“Commander, we’re an advanced intergalactic civilization that has transcended carcinogens like tobacco. May I interest you in a latte? It’s a coffee drink.”
“Coffee? What’s that?”
“Here, let me show you. First push this button to grind the coffee and push here to add water, then froth the milk.”
“Amazing!”
“Yes! Alien technology, don’t you know.”
@jay
One of my favourite parts of participating in the Hugo Awards is scouring the longlist for obscure favourites who performed better than I expected. In an ordinary year, I’d have been thrilled to see The Mountain in the Sea as the top English-language work outside the finalist group. Unfortunately, I can’t trust that its votes were reportedly accurately, and the thrill has been taken away.
I totally concur.
@Brian
Literally the only ones who might enjoy these results are the people who think the Hugos lost their way years ago, who will now point to McCartney’s claim that he was just doing what every Hugo admin does, as an admission that the results have been tainted for a while.
A truly worrying thought.
Because of my work with many (British) learned scientific societies who have varying degrees of governance, I am particularly anxious that there is good governance oversight which I don’t see WSFS providing. I know that some consider my (and my colleague’) concerns over Glasgow 2024 as being trivial, but if you can’t properly oversee the smaller issues, then what hope the bigger one? Well, we have seen what happens with a bigger one.
I hope at the next WSFS Business meeting we get a few things done including:
— including that future Worldcon bids host nations have an appropriate LGBT+ Equaldex (looking at Uganda) and freedom/ Democracy Index score (looking at China in the rear-view mirror and Saudi Arabia 2026).
— The creation of a WSFS board whose job in part is to look into issues raised by WSFS members and to then take them up with the appropriate Worldcon (perhaps informally behind-the-scenes at first and then publicly with naming and shaming if the issue is not satisfactorily resolved.
@GaryMcGath
Wondering which analyses of the 2023 Hugos will get nominated for Best Related Work in 2025. The good stuff is coming out this year, so it’s too late for the 2024 Hugos.
Wouldn’t a Hugo in a science fiction category be more appropriate?
😉
@Brian Z
It is time to actually discourage slate voting.
The problem is that part of the fun of monitoring news and work reviews is coming up with recommended reading/watching lists. We at SF² Concatenation have for a number of years had a January ‘Best of lists’ (Books and Films) but have stressed that this is ‘a bit of fun’. It is not a list arrived at by team member collusion but individual team member recommendations and only if multiple recommendations come in does a work get on the list. The value of this annual exercise is that each year a number of the works we put forward go on to get short-listed or win awards later in the year.
Scroll down to previous years here.
But we have always stated that it is a bit of fun: it is not a slate, people are free to check out works and agree/disagree with us (indeed, I don’t always agree with all that end up on these lists).
@Lurkertype
Kinda liking the idea of paper ballots again, although postage and mailing times from outside the host country is a bit of a barrier. Kinda liking the idea of paper ballots again, although postage and mailing times from outside the host country is a bit of a barrier.</>
I concur. I snail mailed mine by post this year and a few days later Glasgow paused electronic nomination: didn’t affect me.
Also cost of international postage trivial compared to membership fee (and I used track and trace which let me know when it arrived at the PO and then when collected).
@John Lorentz I worked hard to make sure that every vote was counted and had the same value as every other other.
Good on you. 🙂
The stats themselves are mostly fiction for sure, but hardly Hugo-worthy. Maybe Hogu-worthy. 🙂
Isn’t this a truism? If you want unexpected hidden gems, look up juried awards. Almost by definition works that haven’t made a big splash don’t win popular votes, in any context.
At most, “surprise” winners are works where you didn’t realize there was such a large audience for that particular subgenre. A whole lot of someones had to have read it for it to appear on the list at all, even if that large group doesn’t intersect with your usual circle. Sometimes the surprise is discovering a lot of other people also liked something where you thought you were the only one.
In the entire history of the Hugos, can you point to a single winning novel that had poor sales, or was otherwise notably obscure, beforehand?
There are certainly multiple instances of novels with modest midlist sales beating gigantic bestsellers, sometimes by quite a lot. In 2006, Robert Charles Wilson’s SPIN won, and Charles Stross’s ACCELERANDO came in second, pushing George R. R. Martin’s A FEAST FOR CROWS into third place, despite the fact that Martin’s novel had probably sold at least twenty times the number of copies of SPIN and ACCELERANDO combined. In 2012, Jo Walton’s AMONG OTHERS won solidly, and the other finalists were, in order, EMBASSYTOWN by China Miéville, DEADLINE by Mira Grant, A DANCE WITH DRAGONS by George R. R. Martin, and LEVIATHAN WAKES by James S. A. Corey, and again, the sales of Martin’s novel were vastly greater than anything else on the ballot, and yet it came in fourth (third in first-place votes).
And while I’m not going to go paging through several decades of earlier Best Novel Hugo Awards, I distinctly remember that in 1977 Kate Wilhelm’s WHERE LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG won on a ballot that contained, among other finalists, Frank Herbert’s CHILDREN OF DUNE, which was a mammoth international bestseller and, if I recall correctly, the first genre-published hardcover SF novel to make the New York Times bestseller list.
I don’t think any novel that could properly be called “obscure” has ever won, because it’s in the nature of popularly-voted awards that their finalists and winners are, kind of by definition, not entirely obscure. But the correlation between wider-world popularity and success in the Hugo Awards is complicated at the very least.
It’s a bit of whiplash for me to see a discussion about the problem of Hugo winners being too popular when just a few years ago it was Hugo winners were too obscure.
I suppose we could eliminate all slates by the simple process of forbidding fans from talking to each other about what books they like. That would make every ballot completely independent and very unlikely to be identical – and surely it would be trivial to ensure that no discussions occur among fans.
@Patrick Nielsen Hayden
“Frank Herbert’s CHILDREN OF DUNE, which was a mammoth international bestseller and, if I recall correctly, the first genre-published hardcover SF novel to make the New York Times bestseller list.”
Didn’t Stranger in a Strange Land do so before this? And 1984 was on the list in 1949.
I did say “genre-published”, which leaves out Nineteen Eighty-Four. You may be right about Stranger. I see multiple claims online that it was the first SF novel on the New York Times list, but I don’t know if that was in its hardcover or paperback edition.
Brian Z, I’ve got to say that your recent attempt at fan fiction isn’t as compelling as your fan fiction about ‘secret slates’, but neither is particularly convincing.
Okay, I’ve read BrianZ’s Commander Jetson remark multiple times, and I… don’t get it. I mean, I understand what’s happening in it but I don’t understand how it’s meant to relate to the presence of the two authors in question. It’s not written in the style of either author, even Scalzi at his most Shadow War of the Night Dragons self-parody, it doesn’t accurately describe their books, and in general, fails to make any point whatever.
@Lenora Rose
My thoughts as well. I guess it’s suppose to be a mashup making fun of The Collapsing Empire and Legends & Lattes.
I… I would read the heck out of that book. Maybe as written by Becky Chambers?
@Ryan H
😀 Perfect!
eta: Or Catherynne M. Valente! Or Seanan McGuire!
Fair questions. I simply cannot account for what was going on in their heads. Whatever else we might all think of Yalow now, he clearly has spent a lot of time and personal effort in supporting Worldcon and the Hugo Awards in the past. I can only assume that a desire to avoid scandal & conflict led him down a path of least resistance that eventually led to this disaster.
McCarty? Again, no idea. Sci-fi conventions are a big part of his life and I can’t imagine that if he foresaw what the outcome of all this would be, that he’d have eagerly chosen it.
The mistakes? As you say, he conceded the published votes totals per category have errors due to a (implausible) SQL bug. Other possible errors:
1. The Mountain in the Sea might be the wrong name label (ie. the stats published are for a different work)
2. Song of Fungus appears in two categories (this might not be an error as such)
3. Best Editor Long may have at least one nominee labelled incorrectly
4. Best Fan Writer may have at least one nominee labelled incorrectly
6. Lodestar has In the Serpent’s Wake listed twice. The second entry is likely to be Unraveller by Frances Hardinge (it appears on the leaked validation list).
I think 6 is the most likely thing he meant as it is an obvious error, whereas the others only look like errors when you dig
@Camestros Felapton
1) At least Mountain and the Sea and Half-Built Garden.
2) I wonder if Song of Fungus was moved to one category or the other and one wasn’t cleaned up. Or one may also be a mislabel.
3) & 4) Also Novella, Related Work, and Pro Artist as far as I can see.
5) Is no five the new double five?
6) I heard people talking about the Lodestar error pretty quickly, and I asked about it on Dave’s facebook. But that may have been swamped in all the eligibility uproar.
An error in a list of errors!