The Glasgow 2024 Worldcon announced today they have detected at least 377 fraudulent votes for the Hugo Awards, most meant to benefit a particular unnamed finalist, and have disqualified those votes. As a result, the beneficiary of those votes now will not win in their category.
The Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards Statement is published below, followed by a video commentary by Nicholas Whyte, WSFS Division head and Hugo Administrator.
In the course of tallying the votes on the final ballot for the 2024 Hugo Awards, the Glasgow 2024 Hugo Administration team detected some unusual data.
Paragraph 6.2 of the WSFS Constitution states that “In all matters arising under this Constitution, only natural persons may introduce business, nominate, or vote, except as specifically provided otherwise in this Constitution. No person may cast more than one vote on any issue or more than one ballot in any election.”
A large number of votes in 2024 were cast by accounts which fail to meet the criteria of being “natural persons”, with obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics. These included, for instance, a run of voters whose second names were identical except that the first letter was changed, in alphabetical order; and a run of voters whose names were translations of consecutive numbers.
Many of these votes favoured one finalist in particular, who we will call Finalist A. This pattern of data is startlingly and obviously different from the votes for any other finalist in 2024, and indeed for any finalist in any of the previous years where any member of the current Hugo Subcommittee has been involved with administering the Hugo final ballot.
In addition to patterns observable in the data, we received a confidential report that at least one person had sponsored the purchase of WSFS memberships by large numbers of individuals, who were refunded the cost of membership after confirming that they had voted as the sponsor wished.
On the basis of the above evidence, we have concluded that at least 377 votes have been cast fraudulently, of a total of 3,813 final ballot votes that we received. We have therefore disqualified those 377 votes from the final vote tally. This decision is not one made lightly, but we are duty bound as the Hugo Administrators to protect the Hugo Awards and to act against fraud.
We have no evidence that Finalist A was at all aware of the fraudulent votes being cast for them, let alone in any way responsible for the operation. We are therefore not identifying them. Finalist A has not been disqualified from the 2024 Hugo Awards. However, they do not win in their category, once the invalid votes have been disallowed.
No other votes have been disallowed. The only votes disallowed are those which we have positively identified as not cast by natural persons.
We recognise that after the Hugo voting in 2023, many in the community will, understandably, have questions about this. Unfortunately, our ability to answer is very limited, due to our responsibility to maintain the confidentiality of the ballot and data protection regulations. There are proposals to institute a system of independent audit for Hugo votes. But at present such a system does not exist, therefore the raw 2024 voting data cannot and will not be shared outside the Glasgow 2024 Hugo team.
However, the full voting results, nominating statistics, and voting statistics will be published immediately after the Hugo Awards ceremony on August 11th, 2024 as previously agreed in our transparency statement. Those will not include the 377 votes which have been disallowed but will include the other 3,436 votes.
We believe that it is important for transparency that we inform you now about what has happened. We want to reassure 2024 Hugo voters that the ballots cast were counted fairly. Most of all, we want to assure the winners of this year’s Hugos that they have won fair and square, without any arbitrary or unexplained exclusion of votes or nominees and without any possibility that their award had been gained through fraudulent means.
Announcement from the Glasgow 2024 Astounding, Lodestar, and Hugo Administrator
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We know where this happened. So I would like to be more clear.
There were some of the Chinese fans who voted to Chengdu in 2021 using agents to help them get email address and international credit cards. The agents might include some of the publishing houses and one media group which joined the Worldcon deeply. Thus the agents could get the necessary names and email address easily. And many of the fans stop join the Worldcon because of disinformation of the rights, leading to the possibility of abusing the names.
But here comes the question. Although there are several grandiloquent accusations saying that the “The full voting results, nominating statistics, and voting statistics” were decided instead of being calculated, it seemed to be confusing to make the judgments easily. Honestly, the powerful agents can easily ask its employees to follow the directions from their boss or leader andpay for the ballots by themselves without payback or return. This means they can do this by direct administration order instead of a hurry investment.
Also, some friends are worrying that it might be too expensive to spend so much money on Hugo for a science fiction because the fame of Hugo in China has been ruined after the disastrous winner and its media chaos which is mainly about its quality and aesthetic standard. For publishing houses it is not useful in the commercial consideration. But if the “team” A wants for some other things like the evidence of their hard contribution on science fiction industry or fandom, the alibi might not exist.
Especially, I guess I have tried to remind possible someone of the possible illegal situation in the nomination. It looks too weird to see WSFS award itself. But I am not a good reminder…
Luckily, the commercial value in Hugo is not significant enough to make this happen in several countries.
@rcade–
Those were real ballots from real people, who were not breaking any formal rules. It was an outrage against Worldcon traditions and values, but not against the rules.
So there were no grounds in the rules for throwing them out.
I’d like to know more about this: “In addition to patterns observable in the data, we received a confidential report that at least one person had sponsored the purchase of WSFS memberships by large numbers of individuals, who were refunded the cost of membership after confirming that they had voted as the sponsor wished.”
So there were votes cast by real people that were paid for by a third party. No way to detect this except for the fact that apparently one person so contacted spoke up. So presumably the Hugo administrators know the name of the person who was executing the scheme.
@Sandra Miesel–
As far as I can tell, that didn’t happen at Chicon in 1982. I think you mean Noreascon 3, in 1989, and the ballots that came from newly joining supporting memberships paid for with a run of consecutive money orders purchased at a post office, IIRC, Brooklyn.
It was initially assumed that the authors who “benefited” were responsible, but it subsequently became clear that they were entirely innocent. N3 tried to be as transparent as possible, and that became part of the controversy.
Lesson: Even when being transparent, take some care about what you say.
Source Materials About the 1989 Hugo Controversy
A little further datamining of the member list shows a very sharp spike of names in only or primarily Mandarin characters starting at 13062 and continuing through 13680, amounting to 94 new registrations. This includes one distinct run of 15 near-consecutive names (with one non-Mandarian name intervening after the 5th) starting at 13090, 18 near-consecutive registrations starting at 13317 (one non-Mandarian name intervening after the 4th), 7 consecutive registrations starting at 13395, and another run of 9 starting at 13484.
Only 5 primarily or mostly Mandarin character names are outside of that range, starting at 12412 and ending at 14372. But looking back to the mid-12000s through 14000s and comparing to the thousand registrations before that, there seems a distinct uptick in names that show other signs of being Chinese names (pinyin, lack of capitalization) beginning at that point.
Were the Hugo finalists revealed at about the time that there were 12000/ish members?
I’m going to assume that at least some of these names are legitimate Chinese fans just interested in voting once they saw the finalists. But the sudden surge of Mandarin-only names (particularly consecutive registrations), the general uptick in Chinese names when compared to the prior 12000 registrations, it all seems unusual and given the report from the Hugo administration team it seems likely to me that this was not entirely organic.
Liz, you’re right. I was wrong about the year of the incident. The scale of the present controversy is a whole ‘nuther thing.
The position taken wasn’t just that those ballots should be allowed. It was that a Hugo Awards administrator should never throw out ballots for fraud. I argued that they should do this when warranted and was told, quite memorably, that this meant I should never be allowed to run the Hugos.
I have not run the Hugos, but I’m glad Nicholas Whyte and his team have given us this precedent for how to deal with an attempt to steal the award.
@Elio M. García, Jr.: I have been aware of weirdnesses on the Glasgow memberships since around the end of June, and have been scraping and screengrabbing data since then. (I should also have a screengrab of the membership counts since around the time the finalists were announced.)
I hope he doesn’t mind me saying this publicly, but I gave Mike a brief head’s up on July 10th that something funny was going on, but as the true nature was unclear – plus I’m dealing with major real world issues at the moment – I’ve mostly just been capturing data, and haven’t been able to do thorough analyses as yet.
I did reach out to some of my contacts in Chinese fandom, and none of them seemed to be aware of any “organic” reasons why there was a sudden burst of (apparent) Chinese registrations.
If you look at the membership stats published in the final Glasgow PR, and compare to them to the current values, you’ll see some are quite different, to say the least. If memory serves, the data in the PR was probably about a week old by the time that published, going by certain counts.
See my recent posts on Twitter or Mastodon for (a bit) more about what I’d captured.
https://x.com/ErsatzCulture
https://mastodon.social/deck/@ErsatzCulture
@ErsatzCulture
That max nomination tally for Best Related Work is rather eye-popping. I also see Sci Fi Light Years on Weibo knew about the numeral names a week ago, if not longer, and also cited the incredible supporting membership numbers from China.
I think we now have strong reason to believe who the finalist was, and given the alleged ties of Discover X to the Chengdu Worldcon, well, it’s a reminder that there were more people involved in arranging and organizing the event than foreigners to that country.
@rcade–
No, that’s not correct. The problem was that the Puppy votes violated custom, tradition, and Worldcon values, but were ccompletely within the rules as written. They weren’t “fraudulent” in any normal sense of the word.
The 377 ballots in question this year are fraudulent. The ballots at issue in the 1989 Noreascon Hugos were fraudulent.
But the Puppy ballots weren’t, and it required a rules change to limit the impact of slate voting.
@Elio M. García, Jr.:
Just for clarity, SF Lightyear knew about those member names because I spotted them and messaged him about it on July 16th. They looked dodgy to me, but my Chinese skills/cultural knowledge aren’t good enough to know if they might be plausible names. (I know Japanese has numeric/ordinal-ish given names like Kenichi, Kenji, or Go.) The screengrab of those member names which he posted is I think the one I sent him, but the other one highlighting the member counts was one he made.
There are potentially some interesting connections between a couple of Weibo posts he made about the Worldcon and membership, and some of the changes in the suspect member accounts that you noted above (and which I’d already seen). As I think others have noted elsewhere, just because these Worldcon members were recorded as being from Country X, doesn’t mean that they genuinely are from Country X. However, if there are a large set of suspect users, and how they were created over changes, and the timing of those changes (a) matches public posts made on Country X social media, and (b) seem designed to make it harder to spot them on the Worldcon public site, then IMHO there’s a more justifiable suspicion.
However, this is all stuff that needs more thorough investigation than the vague impressions/suspicions I have so far. I’m sure the Worldcon team are far ahead of me on this, given that they have the much richer internal dataset to look at, compared to what was published on the public site.
Since a couple of people have mentioned it now – the listing on the Glasgow 2024 website is not a “full” member list, as anyone can exercise their privacy rights by choosing “Not Listed” on their registration form.
I’m confused. If we don’t know who it is and they aren’t removed from the ballot, how will people know not to vote for them?
@Eneasz – Voting has concluded for the 2024 Hugos.
Well, given that the voting is over, it’s somewhat moot.
@ErsatzCulture
Good that you’ve been on point helping to flag this in public.
I agree with you entirely. I hope the committee will commit to more transparency after the voting, if not sooner, to identify as much as is practicable who the bad actors may be to allow some process to censure or ban them from future Worldcons, and to further improve the security of the ballots (including site selection) in the future.
I’m also increasingly of the belief that a lot of mysteries regarding what exactly happened with the 2023 Worldcon are being tip-toed around, and that events such as these fraudulent ballots may have been a factor in 2021’s site selection drama.
In fact, it would be interesting to see if there were any commonalities between the site selection votes that were questioned (but allowed to remain in play) — such as consecutive numerical email addresses, IIRC, and lack of identifying physical addresses — and these 377 fraudulent voters. I do not know if the membership data from 2021 is still extant or if it and data from this year can have personal information anonymized in a fashion that would still allow common patterns of behavior to be seen, but even comparing these fraudulent memberships to confirmed legitimate memberships would be interesting.
oh, right, duh. sorry and ty
Lis Carey: The 377 ballots in question this year are fraudulent. The ballots at issue in the 1989 Noreascon Hugos were fraudulent.
And the 1989 ballots weren’t actually thrown out. I think in the 1989 case there was perhaps a tiny bit of room for doubt. Here I believe they’ve made clear that there is no question. And that is the only reason they should do so.
I believe the 198@ ballots were thrown out. An additional data point is that they were paid for with consecutively numbered money orders all purchased at the same post office. The con committee was public about what happened and the actions they took. It’s very similar to the current situation., in that the person being benefitted was not the perpetrator.
@Leslie Turek
If you look at the File770 post linked above, you can see it was definitely strongly considered but not done. But regardless, it seems to be the correct call here.
Another big difference is that the 1989 committee DID out the beneficiaries of the suspicious votes.
There is some confusion about what I said. I was talking about what WSFS insiders said about the powers of a Hugo administrator in general, not what they said about bloc voting.
I don’t want to open the can of worms about the Puppies when we already have so much else to discuss.
@ErsatzCulture
On 22 July 2024 on Mastodon, you wrote:
“And just for avoidance of ambiguity in case this gets picked up by “journalists” – ???? is me, I spotted curious stuff on the Glasgow membership pages weeks ago, and have been scraping/screengrabbing those pages multiple times a day to catch evidence.”
Well, on behalf of the other “journalists”, I want to thank you for your hard work and diligence in assisting in uncovering this important story.
Chris B.
@Mike Glyer–
Which turned out to be a mistake. They were discovered to be completely innocent, but it was impossible to unring that bell once they were named. They were harmed by that. Glasgow 2024 has learned from that mistake, and that’s appropriate. This Finalist is most likely completely innocent, too. With the fraudulent ballots removed, they get the benefit of only the legitimate votes they got, and they don’t get hurt needlessly.
Trying to avoid actually ringing that bell…it’s a lot of money for an individual, but not for a corporation, and it appears that a finalist in a category that had a rather odd nomination pattern just happens to be a VP of a for-profit corporation involved in a Worldcon. I’m not sure I would assume “innocent” so much as “not proven”. That does not mean I disagree with Glasgow’s decision.
(Thanks to ErsatzCulture for providing the pieces to add this up.)
I just posted a short thread with a couple more grouped patterns of supporting member names that struck me as odd, given by their nearness to each other.
Twitter version
Mastodon version
@ErsatzCulture
Yeah, noticed those evas too when looking at it.
My initial impression is “well done, Glasgow!”
But I am growing increasingly uncomfortable with the tangled web that seems to be suggested here.
Hypothetically speaking, if an infamous member of an infamous Hugo concom were a benficiary of the invalidated votes… it feels a little self-interested for the current Hugo concom to keep those connections under wraps. Even if it would be the right thing to do under normal circumstances.
Godstalk! (If anyone remembers.)
I may be a little behind the discussion here, but in response to a question by ErsatzCulture, I did some initial slicing and dicing on the very limited nomination data we have for this year, putting it in context with my previous historic trend analysis. I expect I’ll blog it with charts, but you can find my initial findings on Mastodon (@[email protected]).
The short version is that although there are some unusual characteristics in Related Work and Podcast, there’s nothing I see that rises to the level of obvious shenanigans.
P.S. (Just missed the edit window) . . . It’s on CNN’s “5 Things”. :-O
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/23/us/5-things-pm-july-23-trnd/index.html
@ChewyGlacier–
What infamous member of an infamous “Hugo concom” do you mean, Chewy? Because I’ve just looked again through the entire list of finalists, and I don’t see anyone fitting that description. What am I missing? Who do you mean?
Or is this just “We know Glasgow 2024 is guitly; now we just have to find some evidence.”
Elio M. García, Jr. says I agree with you entirely. I hope the committee will commit to more transparency after the voting, if not sooner, to identify as much as is practicable who the bad actors may be to allow some process to censure or ban them from future Worldcons, and to further improve the security of the ballots (including site selection) in the future.
We need right now to stop tossing the word censure around as if it were some magical word out of a decidedly very not good fantasy novel used to ward off all things illegal. Or fattening. Or immoral.
You can’t censure everyone, you simply can’t. And it has potentially legal repercussions if you use their individual names. And in Scotland, it’s personal protected information, so you’re not getting it anyways. So stop it. Please.
As for banning them, that’s not up to anyone but the group who actually runs each Worldcon, the Worldcon committee. I’m going to gently tell you that this is not a democratic affair, you didn’t elect them. They volunteered. And what they do is a lot of long, hard hours. You get to enjoy a Worldcon. Mostly they don’t.
So if they ban someone, it’s done mostly quietly and hopefully you don’t notice. These two were obviously an exception but that’s neither here nor, well, elsewhere.
So can we go back to reading books. It’s more fun, and the thing that binds us together as fans. Let’s enjoy it.
@Lis Carey re. your question to Chewy Glacier
Copying the comment I posted when the 2024 finalists were announced:
The finalist announcement credits her as Tina Wong, but she has also used Tina Wang and Wang Yating. The censured Chen Shi is also listed as one of the (IIRC) planners in the credits of at least the first episode.
@John S/ErsatzCulture–
Okay, I’m not buying it. For “infamous member of infamous Hugo concom” I’d expect McCarty, Yalow, or at least McCarty’s Chinese cochair of the Hugo subcommittee to be the one who would receive the Hugo if they won. Tina Wong, whatever version of her name you prefer, just did some promotional videos for them. That’s rather a reach. Unless, as I said, you start from the premise that Glasgow 2024 is GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY, and we just have to decide how.
I am totally confused as to how anyone thinks anyone here is starting from a premise of Glasgow 2024 of being guilty of anything.
@Lis Carey: It’s not a question of “whatever version of her name [I] prefer”; I am trying to clearly state her Chinese name (in pinyin) and the two English name variants she has used so that there is no ambiguity we are talking about the same person.
Besides being on both the concom and the Hugo team, she was also on the original Chengdu bid team, was on video on one of the two Smofcon panels (granted, I think she mostly talked about Discover X) and is listed as a Vice Secretary of the Chengdu SF Society for profit organization that ran the Chengdu Worldcon.
That seems a little bit more than “just [doing] some promotional videos for them”.
I believe I have noticed the abnormal nomination of Discover X.
Let us start with the clarification of the name. As we have discussed (especially, the clarification from @John S / ErsatzCulture ), it is usually called Yuguo X Fangtan in Chinese and it would be called Hugo X Interview if it was translated into English directly. And many Chinese people who join international business or study abroad will have the habits of having an English name, which is natural. Thus Wang Yating have called herself as Tina, or Joe Yao is actually Yao Chi. (Zimozixiazi is actually a screen name but it was translated as a Japanese name…)
And we can throw the name away now. Discover X might show their urge to keep distance from Chengdu Worldcon so that member would not consider it as a part of Worldcon committee. However, I have figured out that it has been described as “produced by Chengdu Worldcon committee and guided by World Science Fiction Society” in many newsletters. During some conversation with related staff I also expressed my doubts.
So here comes the question. Why WSFS could award itself? I guess Hugo allows committee members to be awarded for their contributions to Worldcon but it shouldn’t allow this kind of nomination. Hugo award was rewarded by Hugo award? Ridiculous. And if necessary the constitution should be added with related articles to prevent this situation from happening.
Actually, there is evidence showing that she works for Chengdu Business Daily and the Chengdu worldcon committee as vice-president. And I have criticized the awful work:
(John Smith said “also now going under the name SF-X Interview it seems”, and I guess this is the name they used when they stopped public video submission and turned it private interview activities).
Sorry but actually it is a non-profit organization. @John S / ErsatzCulture:
Pages from local government (because it needs basic registration)showed that it is non-profit:
However, I can still agree with your opinion that she achieved potential profits. She works for CBD marketing and planning Ltd whose primary service includes organizing commercial ceremonies in Chengdu like Worldcon. The company got some orders from different entities for organizing Worldcon.
For those who like my data geeking, and watching me try to squeeze meaning from sparse data, I have once again committed Hugo Statistics Blogging.
Lis Carey:
I believe we were all trying to speak elliptically rather than expressly name the finalist. It is trivial to determine who we were talking about, but a tiny threshold of effort can be enough to stop people from understanding, eh? I’m going to continue that since we’re all speculating as to both the category and the finalist, and we could be wrong.
Lis Carey:
I was referring to Yalow’s cochair Chen Shi, who was also censured by the MPC, being listed as executive planner for the work. His name wouldn’t be on the actual hugo, that would be a Chengdu vice chair. Also, a honorary co-chair for Chengdu is listed as chief planner for the work.
But if you define only Ben Yalow, Dave McCarty, or Joe Yao being named on an award, as worthy of note, I agree your standard is not satisfied.
However, I suggest that with that standard, you seem to be the one starting from a loaded premise.
Does this mean that those registrations will be prevented from voting in Site Selection? If they, hopefully, have not voted already (since their votes would be untraceable, once disconnected from the registration?)
“In addition to patterns observable in the data, we received a confidential report that at least one person had sponsored the purchase of WSFS memberships by large numbers of individuals, who were refunded the cost of membership after confirming that they had voted as the sponsor wished.”
As I think someone noted upthread, this is not against the rules. (I’m not clear how one could make a rule against it anyway.) That is not to say it is not against the spirit of the Hugos.
@ Cat Eldridge
In what universe is investigating claims that specific persons offered money for people to vote for a certain finalist, claims that appear substantive given the mass of fraudulent votes, and revealing the results of that investigation, personally protected information?
I am not talking about the people casting the fraudulent votes. I am talking about the people behind the people casting the fraudulent votes. As I believe it’s now pretty irrefutable that this relates to the fiasco which was Worldcon 2023, and which may indicate the corruption could well go back to the dramatics around the 2021 site selection, I think it’s actually extremely important that we get as much transparency as possible about this. We have had highly detailed efforts to understand what happened with the Hugo Administration, but the linguistic and geographic barrier has largely insulated the local organizers themselves from the same detailed scrutiny.
I was supportive of the Chengdu bid. I’m an optimist by nature, and I thought it had tremendous potential. Unfortunately, some of the dire predictions around it that I dismissed ultimately turned out to be correct. And here we are, in 2024, once again dealing with incredible levels of misbehavior out of keeping with the spirit of the Hugos coming out of China.
So, I want as much light and clarity about this as possible, especially if it once again implicates members of the Chengdu concom.
And personally, I think the omertà around the 2021 site selection fiasco probably needs to end as I suggested above — fraudulent votes in 2024, rumors of Hugo shenanigans in 2023 related in part to massive slating, it feels like a pattern that should be compared to what happened in 2021. Was the wrong call made to allow the questioned votes? Was Winnipeg robbed of hosting a Worldcon, and were the 2023 and 2024 WSFS handed corruption because of that?
I don’t know. But I’d like to know, in so far as it is practicable.
AnnR on July 23, 2024 at 8:22 pm said:
Does this mean that those registrations will be prevented from voting in Site Selection?
That’s a good question. I would think that since the ElectionBuddy database has to be manually updated that non-natural persons wouldn’t get added and would never get the voting email. If a write-in candidate (or none of the above) somehow managed to get the majority anyway, the business meeting would decide. LA’s the only official filed bid.
In my opinion it is unseemly to be attempting to out the people that the 2024 Hugo Committee are trying to protect. We do not have all the information that the Hugo Committee have. Attempting to discover PII of alleged (but unproven!) conspirators is immoral and likely to harm innocent bystanders.
Some guy asked:
“In what universe is investigating claims that specific persons offered money for people to vote for a certain finalist, claims that appear substantive given the mass of fraudulent votes, and revealing the results of that investigation, personally protected information?”
In the universe where you may be WRONG about your assumptions and suppositions. Naming real people leaves you open to libel claims, not to mention claims against the 2024 Worldcon that they were careless with PII.
Just stop.
(Of course, all just my opinion. I am no lawyer.)
P.S. Forget the Chengdu bid, this is about 2024 Worldcon, not 2023. Whether the 2023 (non?)conspirators are guilty of anything is not germane to the issue at hand.
@Susan–
You don’t think it’s interesting that people are assuming that there must be a nefarious reason for Glasgow not naming the finalist who is the object of the fraudulent votes? There have been fraudulent Hugo vote efforts in the past, and in all cases the “beneficiaries” were innocent. This is another attempt like those, in that it was detected by normal examination of the ballots, according to Glasgow 2024. It’s different in the amount of money that seems to be involved, but it doesn’t appear to have been done by anyone who knows how the Hugos work. Which argues against it having been done by anyone members of the Glasgow 2024 committee or the Hugo subcommittee would feel a need to protect because it could damage themselves.
In that context, let’s note that Glasgow has already banned Yalow and McCarty. Theres no need to ban the Chinese members of the Chengdu committee or Hugo subcommittee, because they’re not coming. There have been some sensible suggestions for who could have done this on the China end–one of the for-profit Chinese sponsors of Chengdu, China Business Daily, or associated individuals. That’s possible–though I’m not sure why they would care that much. But i can believe that they might, if people more knowledgeable on that end think it’s plausible.
What I don’t find plausible is that Glasgow 2024 would fear any reputational damage to themselves, or any new reputational damage to Worldcon, from exposing that if they had enough evidence. Not wanting to throw a probably innocent finalist to the wolves seems a far more plausible reason for not doing so.
@Kendall
Pepperidge Farms remembers…
Regards,
Dann
The finalist is only relevant if it is “Discover X”, because it is so closely bound up with and the child of the Chinese concom, including Chen Shi apparently listed as a producer (IIRC) and Tina Wang (a vice chair) credited as the primary author. If it’s not “Discover X”, and we are barking up the wrong tree, I hope they’d at least be willing to say so.
If it’s some other Chinese work, such as in Fancast, fine. Not much to be done. But if it’s “Discover X”, discovering if the patron behind this scheme is tied to them, which in turn may implicate them in what happened in 2023, seems pretty important regardless of whether we know “Discover X” knew about it or not.
Also, a question for those who know: could an announced Hugo finalist withdraw themselves from consideration at any time before the announcement of the final results, or once you accept the nomination and are publicized, that’s it?
@Evelyn C. Leeper–
I said what the Puppies did was not against the rules; we had no rule banning slate voting. This, someone paying people to vote in a particular way, refunding the cost of the membership only after receiving proof of those people having voted as instructed, is quite different. It might be another thing we never thought to make a specific rule against. However, I think, I’m not going to swear to it, but I think it’s probably covered–the “person” voting isn’t the individual filling out the ballot. It’s one person paying a few hundred people to fill out ballots in a certain way–and we have a not-crazy argument, not one I fund fully convincing, but it’s not crazy, that that “person” may be a corporation, not a natural person.