Seattle Worldcon 2025’s consultative vote drew just a quarter the number of participants who turned out for Glasgow 2024’s inaugural consultative vote last year. Glasgow tallied 1260 ballots, Seattle only 343.
Seattle ran votes on two of the Constitutional amendments that received first passage at the Glasgow 2024 Business Meeting and are up for ratification – (1) the revisions to the Hugo Award categories for Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist, and (2) proposal to abolish the Retro Hugo Awards.
VOTING RESULTS. The results of Seattle’s poll are:
In the vote to amend the constitution so as to eliminate the Retro Hugo Awards:
Yes: 164
No: 167
Total: 331
In the vote to amend the Hugo Award categories for Best Fan and Professional Artist:
Yes: 124
No: 160
Total: 284
These consultative votes are not provided for in the WSFS Constitution, are not binding, and have no effect other than that the information will be known to those at the Business Meeting. The Seattle committee said, “The purpose of the consultative vote was to test whether this type of vote is feasible, in case the practice is someday adopted as a formal part of the WSFS decision-making process.”
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That’s still larger than most of the in-person business meetings.
And it’s still a failure.
Hmm, doesn’t make me very hopeful for the virtual business meetings.
Why should there have been a large vote? I don’t think either of these was something that most of the potential voters was at all interested in. Didn’t the vote total of Retro Hugo’s reflect that? One sec while I check… Best Hugo novel around 2,000 at worst (usually) where the Retro Hugo is around 600 (usually). Big difference. Now I really don’t care if they exist even though I don’t vote sometimes on them, so keep them as they do harm. Like Tribbles. There’re warm, and make most people. Not Klingons or Kirk.
Cat Eldridge: I was just taking it on a wait-and-see basis. It’s the proponents of online voting on WSFS Business who claim this will greatly increase participation — because there’s supposed to be a latent population who want a voice but won’t be at the in-person business meeting.
And you also need to consider — the topic of the Hugos is the most powerful audience attraction the Worldcon has. And two Hugo amendments were the subjects of this vote. There isn’t another thing that most of the potential voters will be more interested in.
I’m just surprised there is such a drop from last year. I suppose some people may not have bothered with this since there are going to be virtual meetings where their votes actually will count. (Unless it gets voted back to in-person at the first one.)
Mike, yes the topic of the Hugos is the most important thing of the Worldcon but the interest in each Hugo varies widely. The novella at Glasgow got 2558 votes whereas the fan writer received just 878. (The novel actually got less than the novella, 2189.) so I’m not surprised the latter of these two questions got very few votes.
The problem isn’t with the consultative vote per se, or with the idea of virtual business meetings per se, but with the way people have used their positions on Worldcon committees to just go ahead and do them anyway because they expect they can’t convince an in-person business meeting to authorize them by majority vote. But now that we’ve seen a Virtual Business Meeting Town Hall draw only 42 people, and the consultative vote participation drop by over two-thirds, here’s a flash — if your idea isn’t robust enough to persuade the in-person business meeting, maybe it’s not robust enough to work.
Mike, you’re right. Neither of these should’ve been brought to a vote as the vote served no purpose. If something is working as is, leave it be.
If you don’t like or know enough to cast a vote for a given Hugo Award, just don’t vote in that category. I don’t. Let those who do, do so.
The rewritten definition of pro artist is deeply, deeply flawed. If you sell any art at all, you’re a pro. If you make some art, give the digital image away to a fannish cause, and then sell the original, you’re ineligible for the fan artist Hugo. It doesn’t matter how the artist defines themself or their art. Jack Gaughan is rolling over in his grave.
I’m with Mike Glyer on this – there’s been a lot of conventions “just doing things” because the rules (even if they have a plainly intended meaning) have some way to slip around them because they “aren’t fully dispositive” or somesuch. It is very frustrating, especially given the number of uncontested bids and things that weren’t mentioned as part of the bid…they’re not even asking for a mandate from the voters to do things, they’re just doing them.
Even though this is more people than have attended most Business Meetings (Spokane might reasonably have edged out one or both votes), I think these numbers are low enough to ignore – there’s no broad expression of will here (turnout is, I believe, a shade over 5% of eligible voters). If anything, I would interpret this result as one either (1) of broad disinterest (be it in WSFS business in general or these business items in particular), (2) folks not being interested in casting an “advisory vote”, or (3) an indictment of bad promotion of the vote(s). Both seem to be valid takes. Given the turnout at the BM Town Hall (even accounting for some questions of promotion and timing) on top of this…well, I don’t know where you go with that? This isn’t what we saw when Glasgow did it,
This also speaks to my concerns from last year, where the proposal to add two Hugo Award categories that had no clear way to differentiate them from the existing categories (there was no definition of what qualified as an “independent film”) got over 40% support.
To be clear, I voted against nixing the Retros – but I would /not/ cite this poll in defense of voting that amendment down. All this tells me is that there’s a small-but-vocal constituency for the Retros, but we already knew that, and in any event the result is hardly definitive in terms of sentiment.
Most WSFS Constitutional amendments are not in themselves interesting and are in themselves technical. Films attract more Hugo voters than the art categories or the Retro Hugos, so it’s not surprising that turnout was higher for a proposal on the former than for proposals on the latter. These votes are consultative and were always intended as such. They still brought in two or three times more participants than the peak attendance at the average Business Meeting session. That’s not a failure.
The timing was experimental. Last year we held the vote for ten days immediately before the convention, the point at which interest in WSFS is perhaps highest. Turnout was gratifyingly high. But we were aware that some proponents of the consultative vote favour a longer, earlier period. So we tried that this year, and got a lower turnout. That’s not a failure, it’s a calibration.
I doubt that I will be personally involved in future exercises, but my advice to organisers would be to go for 10-day period, rather than a whole month, and link it to one of the Business Meeting sessions, probably the first, having the vote conclude a few days before so that the results can be announced there.
I think also that a different Worldcon could devote a few more resources to publicising the vote. I counted all of one social media post about it from Seattle, on the day it closed. (I did a post of my own the previous day.) It was also the last of several items in a newsletter to all members on 23 May, where it was not mentioned in the opening paragraph. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that that’s a failure, but I do feel that it’s the bare minimum and that more publicity would have made a difference. I am sadly familiar with some of the reasons why it didn’t happen that way this time.
It comes down to this though. Is it more legitimate for these decisions to be made by the couple of dozen people for whom it is convenient to meet in a room at a given time? Or by several hundred people in an online up or down vote? I am
impressed by those who are very confident that they already know the answer. In my view, it’s still a work in progress.
Expressed another way:
Vote to eliminate the Retro Hugo Awards:
Yes: 49.5%
No: 50.5%
Vote to amend the Hugo Award categories for Best Fan and Professional Artist:
Yes: 43.7%
No: 56.3%
That’s nearly a tie for the Retros but a 12-point rout for the artist amendment.
I don’t think these votes are a failure because 331 and 284 members voted in them, respectively. They are worth taking seriously as an expression of member opinion, unless you believe it was unconstitutional to hold these votes.
If I had voted I would’ve chosen to spare the Retro Hugos from an untimely demise.
rcade: I know it doesn’t impress you the same way, however, the wording of your comment is symptomatic of exactly what the problem is. “Members voted in them”. There is a business meeting provided in the WSFS Constitution where members can cast binding votes. There is no constitutional authority for a Worldcon to poll members about business passed on from the previous Worldcon. But because the consultative vote is run by the Worldcon it takes on a false color of authority. Which outcome is more legitimate if the business meeting’s decision about these amendments doesn’t match the results of the poll?
Ignoring the votes on constitutional grounds is a valid position, but personally I would consider them when deciding my vote at the Business Meeting. Doesn’t mean I have to support the majority, but knowing more about what other members think is useful. Same goes for listening to the discussion at the meeting or reading opinions in the community before the con about proposals.
Maybe I should muster some outrage about the false authority of a Worldcon conducting these votes and putting a thumb on the scale, but after Chengdu and how we didn’t respond to that, I am way less invested in how we run WSFS.
Last year Jesi asked those at the meeting if they had any objection to hearing the results of the consultative vote read out before discussion of those ammendments.
Not just Chengdu. Having watched the Glasgow committee dictate how certain business must be handled, and now the Seattle committee unilaterally dictating a virtual format for the business meeting without any public discussion at all, just why they’re even holding a business meeting is as hard to answer as what purpose the Roman Senate served after the emperors moved in. This supposed democratic process has been thoroughly undermined.
I’m a member of several groups who get together annually to share our mutual interests in various subjects. It wouldn’t occur to any of us to cede direction of what we do at those get-togethers to people who don’t come to them.
I don’t think you can infer anything from the turnout at the “Town Hall” about the Business Meeting. The first session was cancelled, and the second was on a (US) holiday weekend . I didn’t attend because of Balticon, but I knew it was being recorded, so I just watched it on YouTube.
You definitely can infer something from the miniscule turnout at the Town Hall — how surprisingly few people who aren’t already WSFS veterans care about the opportunity to participate virtually. How else is somebody supposed to get ready to do more than passively watch the livestream unless they learn how the platform will be used to run the meetings? Watch the YouTube recording, you say. It has 45 views as of today (but two of those views are mine). You also excuse the turnout for the Town Hall because it was held on a US holiday weekend. Don’t forget that the first session of the business meeting is scheduled for the Fourth of July.
Do your groups engage in a 72 year activity that gets most of the press attention and invites thousands of people to become paying members and participate remotely?
In theory, I like the idea of virtual business meetings and would be likely to attend them. In over 25 years, I think I’ve only attended one business meeting onsite as they are scheduled against other things that I want to do, and usually poorly advertised as to what the actual or probable action is going to be on.
However, the execution previewed at the virtual business meeting town hall was disheartening, both technically and as a method of running and ruling on business at such a meeting.
I’m relieved at the (narrow) failure of the vote to abolish the Retro Hugos.
I participated in person in last year’s Business Meeting sessions throughout (feeling that after 46 years of attending [some] Worldcons it was about time I put in my shift), and with about a minute of debate time to go wanted to speak further against this motion, but was pre-empted by a motion to proceed straight to the question (I think, this was my first encounter with Roberts’ Rules, which is less ubiquitous in the UK).
By the way, I was in awe of the expert way in which the Chair and other officials ran the Meeting and managed to get through the very considerable amount of business. Kudos.
I also became aware of how difficult it is for WSFS to respond quickly, with remedial measures, to unexpected problems such as those arising from the Chengdu Hugo debacle. (My motivation to retain the Retro Hugos is partially linked to that, though I have another unconnected reason. I won’t go into details of either here, unless asked).
@rcade
“Do your groups engage in a 72 year activity that gets most of the press attention ”
What does the amount of press attention that the Hugos get have to do with anything?
“and invites thousands of people to become paying members and participate remotely?”
The Hugos used to be an award given out by the fans at Worldcon. Now Worldcon is a convention set up and run to give out Hugos. This putting of the cart before the horse is the direct source of 90% of the problems that Worldcon has experienced in the last 15 years.
For what it’s worth, I voted.
There have been lots of comments since Chengdu about the need to fix WSFS somehow, right now. They were dissatisfied with WSFS’ slow process and not trusting the regular WSFS crew to do the right thing. Opening up online participation was one of the more common ideas. So Glasgow and Seattle tried it. I think it was worth a try. Maybe with some tinkering, it could be made to work better, but it’s obviously not the shot in the arm that people were clamoring for.
Worldcon is not set up to run the Hugos. The WSFS is set up to run Worldcons and run the Hugos. These objectives are stated in Section 1.2 of the WSFS Constitution.
Every year the attendance of Worldcon includes many people who don’t participate in the Hugos at all.
The plain meaning of “choose the locations and committees” is that locations could be chosen for running a con as a Worldcon and some local fans in those places would be the ones running them.
The drafters did not foresee nonprofit organizations dedicated to conrunning perennially kicking Worldcons back and forth between them. They just meant fans from different places.
WSFS chooses which may be designated “Worldcon” and host a Hugo ceremony. It does not and may not play any other role in conrunning.
@rcade
“Worldcon is not set up to run the Hugos.”
Since we are getting all constitutional . . .
That’s all, only three duties, and #’s 2 and 3 exist only so that #1 can continue.
Everything else Worldcon does — film programs, speeches, panels, huckster rooms, art shows, kaffeeklatsches, book signings, parties, author meet-and-greets, tours, displays, cosplay, filking, etc. — all the fannish activity that makes a convention fun — is, from the perspective of the WSFS Constitution, incidental to handing out Hugos, and are completely optional. Worldcon’s governing documents direct Worldcon to hand out Hugos, and to make sure that the following Worldcons can hand out Hugos.
Technically “administering the Hugo Awards” doesn’t actually require the handing out of trophies at a ceremony part. Only the tallying of nominations and final votes in a proscribed manner and publishing results.
Bill:
The reason that the Constitution only lists the Three Required Functions is because trying to regulate in detail what a Worldcon does is a fools’ errand. WSFS actually doesn’t really want to get into that level of detail. It would rather let the individual conventions do what they want as long as they don’t violate the rules requiring the small number of things they’re required to do. Do you really want the Constitution lumbered with provisions about the content of programming, the size and readability of membership badges, what events must and must not be held, and so forth?
These discussions always remind me of A Few Good Men and Tom Cruise asking a Marine, “Is the location of the messhall in the Manual?” A lot of necessary things are not in the rule book
@Kevin — No, I’m not looking to have all of the Worldcon activities formalized in the Constitution. I’m just observing that you can tell what is important to an organization by how it spends its time and effort. Hugos occupy the Constitution and the business meetings, ergo they are the important thing.
And getting back to my original point, there’s certainly an argument to be made that letting nonattendees have such a big voice can work to the detriment of the Worldcon. Setting up a voting membership at a reduced cost for nonattendees opened up a path for the gaming of votes by the puppies. Chengdu wouldn’t have happened without non-attending site-selection voting.
I agree with Bill’s sentiment. IMO a WSFS-Only Membership (as Seattle is calling it) should not infer or grant constitutional voting rights. Either an Attending Membership or a Virtual Full Attending membership should be required for voting rights. Otherwise $50 is all that required to make constitutional changes. And that doesn’t set very well with me.
A supporting membership has traditionally included the rights to vote in site selection and the Hugo Awards.
The problem with Chengu wasn’t that there are lots of fans in China and they voted. The Chengdu concom, including some experienced American SMOFs, screwed up running the con. It was a massive disappointment to the Chinese fans who supported the bid. They deserved better.
That having been said, I agree that opening up the Business Meeting to online participation is risky.
I believe that bill is totally wrong that such a path was set up, unless he means the first Worldcons contained the seeds of their destruction. Supporters paying a pittance always had the right to nominate and choose sites.
What unleashed this dysfunction was normalizing free books and stories by dozens of marquee authors, and entire serieses, as a perk for an increasingly self-centered, entitled and shrill cohort of new nonattendants.
I do think that giving out genuine fan awards are the real point of the huge fan gathering, and the distortions and dysfunctions related to Worldcon governance will abate and we can get back to having fun if we fix them.
The Hugos worked when they were classified by functional publishing category, but word count is long obsolete.
Realign them with reality:
Best Fan Text (=made available to all without any conditions)
Best Fan Audio
Best Fan Video
Best Fan Interactive Work
The rest should evolve with publishing. In 2025, perhaps:
Best Advertising-supported X, Y Z
Best Subscription-only ….
Best Tradpub …
And some point you’re going to have to agree what to do with nominees who used AI.
Or are AI.
Get back to the original spirit. Somehow.
The puppies were able to game nominations because nominations were low. Not enough people participate in site selection either.
Brian Z.
“Supporters paying a pittance always had the right to nominate and choose sites.”
Not entirely accurate. Site Selection was originally done at the Business Meeting.
Until NyCon III, the 25th WorldCon, with a previously unheard of Membership of 1,500 (breaking Chicon II’s 15 year old record of 1175) voted for a Hoax Bid.
The real bidder was Los Angeles, who made a lackluster presentation amounting to “You know us, We told you our plans at all the parties. You know we will do a good job. Vote for us.” However, some jokers that had recently run Pacificon II near San Francisco decided that LA shouldn’t be unopposed and threw together a presentation including slides as a joke. They figured that everyone knew LA was the real bid, so it was just harmless fun. The massive attendance of the Business Meeting didn’t know, voted for the better presentation, and BayCon, the 26th WorldCon, was born. Fortunately you could throw together a sub-2000 member convention in 1 year. Baycon ultimately shattered the record again with 1841 total members.
Mail-in balloting for Site Selection quickly followed.
As the WSFS Constitution doesn’t have and equivalent to the US Constitution’s 10th Amendment, I don’t see a Constitutional Problem with a Seated WorldCon, or even a Bid, holding as many consultative votes as they want.
I see a colossal problem in a WorldCon explicitly ignoring at least two provisions related to the Business Meeting to hold Virtual Business Meeting(s) with binding effect. The first requiring the Business Meeting to be held during the WorldCon, and the second banning any sort of remote or proxy voting.
I am not opposed to moving the Business Meeting to a Virtual Format in principle, but not by “its easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.” As many have pointed out, changing the WSFS Constitution is hard, deliberately so, but this turns the Constitution into, to paraphrase Captain Barbarossa in the Pirates of the Caribbean “The [Constitution] is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”
“Done at,” yes, but was there leeway to tally absentee votes? It isn’t clear from the texts.
The record shows a rule that all participants in site selection votes must be physically present was first codified by George Schithers in a proposed constitution at Discon in 1963.
How convincingly his draft constitution was actually ratified escapes me, and Schithers himself was arguing in print in November 1964 against a “recent” push (which would have been at Pacificon II, and three years before NyCon III) to have mail-in votes. His argument against letting that happen was that Robert’s Rules dictates otherwise. Yet the constitution he advocates for acknowledges that Worldcons can follow their own rules, and it is not clear, from the documentary record, what Worldcons actually did.
Another version of that Schithers constitution is said to be associated with Noreascon I (1971) but it is not clearly stated (at least on the WSFS site) from what primary source this springs and there are no minutes. It isn’t until 1974 that a “new constitution” is documented as having been formally adopted, again at a Discon. And that one acknowledges members can feel free to mail in site selection votes. (In 1975, mail them to Australia.)
Did Worldcons prior to that, particularly when not named Discon, strictly consider only votes cast by those present during a Business Meeting?
@Brian Z
“I believe that bill is totally wrong that such a path was set up, unless he means the first Worldcons contained the seeds of their destruction. ”
Well, the first Worldcons didn’t even have Hugos. Non-attending members could vote for the very first Hugos, but the idea of a reduced membership rate for non-attending members wasn’t propsed until Pitcon in 1961.
So no, I didn’t mean that the first Worldcons contained the seeds of their destruction.
If I understand what they said during the Town Hall, the Chair of the 2025 Business Meeting has said they are ruling that for the purposes of the Business Meeting, the 2025 Worldcon actually starts on July 4, 2025, the date of the first scheduled meeting. Assuming that this ruling or any similar ruling on the legality of the virutal business meeting is appealed, the Chair has said that if their ruling is overturned, all of the virtual meetings will be voided, and presumably Seattle would have to schedule “traditional” WSFS Business Meetings during the dates of the in-person convention. This suggests to me that the July 4, 2025 meeting will have parliamentary fireworks immediately after being called to order. I deliberately scheduled the start of Westercon 79 Site Selection voting at BayCon 2025 to start after the scheduled time of the conclusion of that Business Meeting so that I can participate from my hotel room on my computer.
Appeal the Ruling of the Chair is a strange motion, by the way. It is normally put in the form “Shall the ruling of the Chair be sustained as the decision of the body?” (or similar words) and it takes a majority opposed to that motion to overturn the chair. voting Yes means you agree with the Chair’s ruling. Voting No means you do not agree with the Chair’s ruling. A tie sustains the Chair, and the Chair is allowed to vote if their vote would create a tie. (Technically, they could also vote against sustaining their ruling, but it’s hard to think of any case where they would ever do so.) Also, the Chair is allowed to debate the motion while still presiding. The debate starts with the Chair giving their case for the ruling, after which debate alternates between people opposed to the Chair’s ruling and those in favor of it, with nobody being allowed to speak more than once, except that the Chair is allowed to speak one more time to close the debate before putting the question to a vote. This mechanism doesn’t apply to any other type of motion except an Appeal.
In 1946 fans were invited to pay postage to mail in their Worldcon site preference with an enclosed written assurance that, if it came to their area, they’d join.
I see it isn’t emphasized in the widely available snippets of zines, but it is hinted at, and I can’t shake the feeling that participation by the non-present continued.
While all members could participate in this non-binding consultative vote and submit proposals (as usual), attending and voting at Seattle’s virtual Business Meeting requires a virtual attending or in-person attending supplement. So at least $85 to actually vote on constitutional changes.