By Kevin Standlee: In light of the revelation that modeling of E Pluribus Hugo does not result in quite the “magic bullet” that some may have hoped for, we may need to consider other changes to the Hugo Award voting system to deal with bad actors deliberately setting themselves against the wishes of the majority of the voting members of the World Science Fiction Society. Over the past few weeks, I have written up descriptions of three different proposals that attempt to deal with bad actors in different ways, and to make it more likely that the results of the Hugo Awards represent the wishes of the majority of the participating members, without the members having to resort to the 16-ton anvil that is No Award.
All of the proposals below are compatible with either of the proposals up for ratification this year (EPH and 4/6). They are not necessarily compatible with each other. None of them require a Very Strong Administrator picking and choosing individual members’ ballots or disqualifying individual finalists on what I call “ideological” grounds. All of them aim to give the majority of the members a strong voice in picking the Hugo Awards.
In this overview, try not to get too deeply bogged down in specific details. For example, all three proposal refer to the “Top 15.” This is a reference to the “long list” currently defined in the WSFS constitution thusly:
3.11.4: The complete numerical vote totals, including all preliminary tallies for first, second, . . . places, shall be made public by the Worldcon Committee within ninety (90) days after the Worldcon. During the same period the nomination voting totals shall also be published, including in each category the vote counts for at least the fifteen highest vote-getters and any other candidate receiving a number of votes equal to at least five percent (5%) of the nomination ballots cast in that category, but not including any candidate receiving fewer than five votes.
Therefore, the “top 15” can be defined in different ways, and there’s a reasonable argument to be made for many of them. Don’t get too tangled up in specifics. These proposals have general principles, and if you’re agreeable to the general idea of any of them, then we can discuss the specific values for some of the blank spots in them.
In the list below, the links lead to my LiveJournal where each proposal is listed in more detail.
3-Stage Voting (3SV) adds a new round of voting to the Hugo Award process, called “semi-finals,” between the existing nominating ballot and the existing final ballot. In 3SV, the top 15 nominees (including any ties, and see the warning about specifics above) are listed in a way that doesn’t show how many nominations they received. The members (supporting and attending) of the current Worldcon (not the previous and following Worldcons) are presented with this list, with a question on each of the fifteen semi-finalists in each category: “Is this work worthy of being on the Final Hugo Award Ballot?” with the choices being YES, NO, and ABSTAIN.
If a sufficient quorum (which is why counting explicit abstentions is important) votes, and if a sufficient number vote NO, that semi-finalist is disqualified from further consideration. As currently proposed, the necessary NO vote is “more NO than YES votes,” but the exact amount needed to disqualify is negotiable. Remember, even if every vote is NO, if a quorum (minimum number of voters) doesn’t participate, the work cannot be disqualified. (This makes it difficult for a small group to campaign against a work.)
At the end of the semi-final round, any works disqualified by the members, withdrawn by the nominees, or disqualified by the Committee on technical grounds is out of the running. From among the remaining semi-finalists, the five that got the most votes in the nominating phase become the finalists, and the final ballot continues as it currently does. Note that in this case it doesn’t matter how many YES votes a semi-finalist got, only that it didn’t get a negative majority.
3SV effectively moves the votes on NO AWARD to the semi-finals, although it would remain a candidate on the final ballot. It allows the members of the current Worldcon (the ones who will be voting on the final ballot) to decide in advance which works they think deserve to be on the final ballot. It does this at a price, however, and that price is to carve 6-8 weeks out of an already relatively crowded schedule. The proposal moves the deadline by which you have to be a member in order to nominate up by a month, and in practice would require the nominating deadline to be earlier in the year.
Another drawback of 3SV is that it triples the number of nominees that the Worldcon Committee (the Hugo Award Administrators) need to vet and contact. However, as a trade-off, it gives the administrator roughly three times as much time to do this contact work, and makes the vetting and contacting process public. That is because the Administrator would not need to contact semi-finalists in advance of announcing the “longlist” of semi-finalists. While the semi-final ballot runs, the Administrator would be contacting semi-finalists to give them an opportunity to withdraw from consideration in the final ballot. Administrators could put out a public appeal if they are unable to contact a given semi-finalist. In addition, the Administrator can do eligibility confirmation in public, with the help of the many other people who will undoubtedly be checking over the list and asking questions. Should a semi-finalist be disqualified on technical grounds, the semi-finalist would not be replaced on the semi-final ballot. Ineligible works show up on the existing Top 15 lists now, and the semi-final round would be too short to allow for replacing longlist slots.
An incidental feature of 3SV is that the finalists would not know they’d made the final ballot until the shortlist was announced. They’d know they were semi-finalists, and during the semi-finals they would have had time to decline if they so choose, but it would be impossible for them to leak being a finalist because they would not know it themselves.
Additional drawbacks to 3SV include the fact that it is explicitly negative. It is a place where you vote against things. Some people are philosophically opposed to “down-voting” works. Furthermore, should the known bad actors stop trying to game the system, there is little need for this semi-final round, and you might find people not even bothering to participate in it, which might result in complaints that we’d added complexity and expense for no obvious reason.
3SV is a “vote against stuff” system. An alternative to it was the second proposal.
Proposal 2: Double Nominations with Approval Voting
Double Nominations with Approval Voting (DN/AV, sometimes just DN) is similar to 3-Stage Voting, in that there would be a semi-final round with the Top 15 (see warning at the beginning of the article) nominees listed in an order that would not reveal how many nominations they received. Only members (attending and supporting) of the current Worldcon would vote at this stage. But instead of voting against semi-finalists as you do in 3SV, you would vote for those semi-finalists who you think deserve to be on the final ballot. You could vote for one or all of the semi-finalists. The version as currently proposed included a single write-in slot as well, primarily as a safety valve. In this case, the number of votes a semi-finalist gets here is critical, because only the top five would continue to the finals.
In 3SV, the number of YES votes doesn’t matter as long as there are fewer NO votes (or insufficient ballots cast to qualify the election at all). The relative number of YES votes doesn’t matter as long as the semi-finalist isn’t disqualified, because it’s the original nominating ballot count that sends works on to the final round if they survive the weeding-out process of 3SV’s downvotes. However, in DN/AV, the five works with the most votes in the semi-final round go on to the final ballot, and the number of nominating ballots cast to get the works onto the longlist is irrelevant. Some have called for nominating counts to be used as a tie-breaker, as they envision a 15-way tie for the final ballot. I personally think this unlikely, and there have been as many as eight finalists on a Hugo ballot due to ties for the final position, so I think we could live without a tie-breaker.
All of the extra administrative issues of 3SV are shared by DN/AV, so I won’t go over them again here.
DN/AV eliminates the “negative” aspect of 3SV, in that you vote for semi-finalists, not against them.
Some have suggested that there’s an implication that “you need to have read all of the semi-finalists in order to vote on this ballot,” although I don’t think that is true in either case. DN/AV is a second nominating round. Just as the current nominating ballot makes no pretense that you should have read everything published last year, DN/AV doesn’t expect voters to have read all fifteen semi-finalists, but instead to pick those that the voters think worth considering on the final ballot, knowing that only the top five will appear there.
The biggest advantage to either 3SV or DN/AV is that they put the decision of “what to have on the final ballot” in the hand of the members who will be voting on that final ballot, and that the majority will of those voters will prevail. Neither system is particularly susceptible to gaming by small minorities. The biggest drawback to either of the first two proposals is that they add an additional round of voting, with administrative overhead and complexity.
Some people have asserted, with various degrees of strength, that the Committee (Hugo Award Administrators) should simply ignore “slate voters” or disqualify “obvious slate-generated finalists.” In my opinion, such proposals are hugely problematical, in that they give Administrators authority they have never had in the entire history of the Hugo Awards. However, there is one historical precedent to which we can look when a group of bad actors appears to have forced a work onto the ballot, and the Worldcon Committee tried to ameliorate the action without actually disqualifying anyone. We’ll consider this in the final proposal.
In 1989, the Hugo Award Administrator noticed an odd situation, where a set of nominating ballots arrived in close order with a single nomination cast in a single category. This was enough to place a finalist on the ballot that seemed unusual to anyone who had been watching the kinds of things that had made the shortlist in recent years. The ballots all having included membership payments in the form of consecutively numbered money orders further raised suspicions. According to the coverage of the situation in File 770 at the time, the 1989 Worldcon committee said in a statement at the time that they didn’t do any investigation, but that one person wrote to the committee to inquire why he had a membership when he hadn’t paid for it. (After they made a public statement, some fans contacted the committee claiming to have cast these votes with innocent intent.) In any event, there has always been a strong ethos in the Hugo Awards to allow the membership to speak, not a small committee. On the other hand, this case seemed to be doing someone out of a Hugo Award finalist slot unfairly. The Committee took the unprecedented step of adding the sixth-place nominee to the shortlist. Not too long thereafter, one of the six finalists (the one that seemed to be odd compared to the others) withdrew. There is no evidence or suggestion that the finalist who withdrew had anything to do with the string of bullet-voted ballots. At most, this was a case of enthusiasts with more money than common sense or ethics.
The final proposal that I’ve written up would explicitly authorize the Worldcon Committee (in practice, the Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee set up by the Worldcon Committee) to take the action that the 1989 Worldcon did whenever they think that there was a pattern of unethical voting in the nominating round. The Committee would be authorized to add up to two additional finalists from among the Top 15. They would not reveal which finalists they added until after the Hugo Awards ceremony, when it would be included in the post-ceremony detailed results.
I have no expectation that the current people who have typically been part of the Hugo Administration Subcommittee would be the ones who would make the actual Plus 2 decisions. I expect that any sensible Worldcon Committee would recruit additional Administrators for their literary judgement, just as the World Fantasy Award does. Any Administrator, no matter whether they were recruited for computer skills, literary skills, or public relations skills, would be ineligible for that year’s Award just as the current Administrators are.
Should the Administrators determine that there was no need to do so, they could choose to not add additional finalists. Thus, if known Bad Actors desist from their wrecking ways, the Administrators could simply continue running things as we have done in the past, leaving it up to the five highest pluralities of nominations. This would simplify administration and require relatively little change.
This proposal allows the Committee to pull from the Top 15, rather than simply the next two finishers in the nominations, to minimize multiple-slating attacks on the system that would try to dominate the top seven rather than the top five positions. While 20% of the electorate has been able to dominate the first five positions relatively easily, it seems unlikely that such a small group could dominate the top fifteen unless their voting power grew to a majority of the entire electorate. Inasmuch as solutions that represent a majority of the electorate (even if you personally dislike the result) are not contrary to democratic process, there is nothing in this proposal that tries to “defend against it.” As I’ve said above and will continue to say, if you can command a majority of the voters, you get your way, even if I don’t like it. It is minorities dominating the process that troubles me.
Note that there’s nothing magic about adding two additional works. It could be one or more. The exact value is debatable. However, consider that we do hope that most people read all or most of the finalists, and therefore making the shortlist too long works against any good you might get from adding (say) five extra works to the ballot.
Broadly speaking, Plus Two is compatible with either (but not both) 3SV and DN/AV. That is, this proposal can be considered separately from either 3SV or DN/AV, whereas the first two proposals above are antithetical to each other, and only one of them could be reasonably considered at a time.
The biggest advantage of Plus Two is that it’s relatively simple, does not add a lot of administrative overhead, and allows the existing two-stage process to stay in place, with only a relatively minor change of adding works to the final ballot. It also adds the “human judgement element” that it appears that many people seem to think is necessary to combat bad-faith efforts to sabotage the Awards.
The biggest disadvantage is that it gives Administrators an authority that they’ve never actually had before, and that they have used only once before, without any explicit sanction. Administrators may be reluctant to serve on the Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee if they know that they may be responsible in some way for adding works to the Hugo Award ballot.
Conclusions
There are no “magic bullets” when it comes to tinkering with the Hugo Award rules. None of the proposals here is a perfect fix. Indeed, per Arrow’s Theorem, there is no such thing as a perfect voting system. However, we can try to move things around and minimize unfairness, usually at the expense of additional complexity. The political question then is how much complexity we can tolerate to improve perceived fairness.
The Instant Runoff Voting system that we use on the final ballot is a case of trading complexity (IRV boggles the minds of people who reject anything other than First Past the Post voting) for fairness (IRV usually returns the least-disliked candidate in an election, rather than the one with the largest plurality; in a field of more than two candidates like the Hugo Awards, it usually returns a consensus winner, not just a strong front-runner). Should we decide that the changes we’ve started with E Pluribus Hugo and 4/6 that are up for ratification this year are insufficient to tilt the field back toward perceived fairness, it behooves the members of WSFS meeting in Kansas City this summer to consider additional changes now, not later.
WSFS rules are intentionally complicated to change, in order to prevent concerns of a day or even of a single year to overwhelm the process. However, that doesn’t mean that we cannot start queuing up additional changes now while we continue to monitor how things proceed, in order to protect our own longer term interests.
I expect at least one of the proposals outlined here to be on the agenda of this year’s WSFS Business Meeting. We might even have all three of them.
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After my comment to Bill, I’m wondering if it would work to give the admins the power to disqualify works whose presence on the finalist list would damage the reputation of the awards. (Or suitable wording to describe excremental works nominated maliciously.) That’s not nearly as hard a call as deciding if something is from a slate or not.
In those cases, not only would the item be struck from the ballot, the memberships of everyone voting for them would be cancelled without a refund. (Might want to consult a lawyer about that, but plenty of places sell tickets with a proviso that disruptive behavior will result in ejection with no refund, so it’s not entirely out of the question.)
Or, if the Admins are nervous about doing that, perhaps there could be a provision for them to ask for a ruling from some other body. E.g. WSFS itself, despite the “irrevocable” nature of the delegation of authority to the subcommittee. There is a certain logic to that, since the admins are responsible just for the current convention, but WSFS is the one affected by things that do lasting damage to the reputation of the awards. (Assuming that “ask WSFS” even means anything.)
@Camestros Felapton
No problem. You never claimed to be a math guy. 🙂
Correct. I distinctly typed “maths” (yeah, or maybe “matsh”)
@Greg Hullender: In those cases, not only would the item be struck from the ballot, the memberships of everyone voting for them would be cancelled without a refund.
Nothing could possibly go wrong. LOVE IS REAL.
If it’s just a matter of getting rid of unacceptable works, do we actually need to publish the longlist? What about just allowing fans to early-no-award works on the shortlist, and have them replaced by the next item(s) on the list, without announcing in advance what the next items are? The replacement items would also be subject to no-awarding once they are announced.
I’d suggest a relatively low threshold of no-award requests (perhaps 300?) to trigger a vote, along with announcement of what the replacement would be. The vote-to-remove would require some kind of supermajority of participants. An increasing threshold for calling a vote might be a wise precaution, eg 300 to call for a no-award vote on an original finalist, 500 for a replacement, 800 for a replacement’s replacement. That would prevent griefers from calling for repeated no-award votes on everything until every single nominated work has been announced, if there are enough of them to reach the first threshold. They’d lose all the votes anyway, but it would still be a major hassle.
I still think some kind of longlist like DN is a much better idea, but 3SV doesn’t take advantage of the longlist. With 3SV, an objectionable work only has to make the top 15 to require voters to go to the trouble of no-awarding, and gets attention even if it had no chance of making the top five.
@the little mole: Because that could require multiple rounds of voting. The longlist lets us do it once.
I guess that could be quicker if it was always done i.e. a sort of ‘I object’ early vote on the short list. Everybody gets to check a box next everything on the shortlist. If a work gets too many ticks it is taken off and replaced for the final round of votes. Don’t bother with a trigger but make the % high so that the odds are it would get No Awarded anyway. As the expectation would be people would only use it for horrible stuff there is no need for the aspects of 3SV that are there to spare people’s feelings *BUT* roll it together with the ballot changes for people who decline nominations after they have been announced – that Person X can say they withdrew their work rather than it being chucked off by voters. Record would only say “withdrawn” for all of them.
Upside over 3SV
1. The barrier to get on the list is higher
2. Voters get to see the approximate shortlist quicker
3. closer to current process
Downsides:
1. You wouldn’t know what you were getting instead of the down voted work.
2. The potential for malicious down votes could be higher.
3. Nasty stuff still gets to be a finalist (sort of) even if it gets bounced off
4. You still have to have an extra round of voting + most of the down sides of either long list proposal.
@Greg Hullender After my comment to Bill, I’m wondering if it would work to give the admins the power to disqualify works whose presence on the finalist list would damage the reputation of the awards. (Or suitable wording to describe excremental works nominated maliciously.)
I’d love to see the wording for that. Given all the fan arguments over winners every year, your comments on who should and shouldn’t be considered this year, I see no way of this working or passing. I have issues with damaging the reputation of the Hugos as that can be misapplied in soooo many ways.
I believe Jim Henley, with my seconding, has suggested, on Pixel 5/18/16 (?), applying CoC to works: anything which is harassment of an author(s) or otherwise violates to CoC would be removed. This year that would apply to “if you were…” and “Safe Space…” at a minimum. OGH had issues as did at least on other commenter.
@Rail: rounds of voting could happen simultaneously. I’d expect elimination voting on any given work to remain open for a couple of weeks. Perhaps a “current elimination votes” page, where people can edit their votes on any work up for elimination (just as they can currently edit their final round votes), with new works added as needed. If there was a slate of five highly objectionable works, three of which made the shortlist, I’d expect a vote to be called on the three within a day, three replacements announced the next day, and a further vote called the day after that to get rid out the other two objectionables if they’re in the first set of replacements. Wait a few days before voting, and you can vote on all the elimination candidates in one batch.
In years without griefers, nobody calls for an elimination vote on anything, so this round doesn’t happen at all, which sounds better to me than unnecessarily publishing the longlist every year. I don’t think there’s much room for non-griefers to abuse the system; you’d need hundreds of people who not only think a work doesn’t belong on the ballot, but believe most other voters would agree with them. I’d consider calling for a vote you know you’ll lose to be griefer behaviour; there’s still No Award for works you consider unworthy but which aren’t blatantly objectionable.
Brian Z on May 21, 2016 at 9:46 am said:
The current deadline is January 30. The eligible electorate is the union of the previous, current, and following years’ members. This year, that was somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 people, of whom around 4,000 participated. I’m not really concerned about this issue. I don’t think you are, either, concern-trolling aside.
Hampus Eckerman on May 21, 2016 at 10:23 am said:
If we as WSFS decide to explicitly disenfranchise anyone who does not vote electronically and who does not have an e-mail address (or does not check it at least once a week), then you can shorten the time frame. That is a separate discussion. One of the people you would disenfranchise is my wife. You may not consider those people worth considering. I’d rather we debate the wisdom of disenfranchising them as a separate question. I consider 6-8 weeks the minimum practical time to mail ballots and have them returned by mail, and even then I know that a few outliers are going to be missed.
Laura on May 21, 2016 at 10:41 am said:
There’s nothing wrong with that at all.
Greg Hullender on May 21, 2016 at 11:02 am said:
I currently think that eligibility should be frozen at the point the longlist is announced, although I could be persuaded otherwise. I can actually see reasons for and against this.
At this time, eligibility for nominating is frozen at January 31 (I want to move it back a month). Eligibility for voting on the final ballot is not frozen until the end of final ballot voting; that is, you can buy a membership up to the end of final ballot voting and vote immediately.
Greg Hullender on May 21, 2016 at 5:23 pm said:
How does Worldcon N refund the membership of a member of Worldcon N-1 or N+1 that they wish to disenfranchise?
WSFS consists of the members of WSFS. Consulting them is what 3SV does. WSFS doesn’t have a central executive. This is what discombobulates most people trying to deal with it, both friends and enemies alike. Even destroying one individual Worldcon doesn’t destroy WSFS itself, due to its distributed nature.
@Camestros Felapton:
That’s an option, but I think a trigger to alert voters that there’s a work in dispute would be helpful. With 3SV, nobody knows for sure whether any given work is in danger of being eliminated till after it’s all over. But I guess either 3SV or my proposal could work with or without the trigger.
4. Voters have fewer works to consider.
Is that a bad thing? Whether a work is objectionable or not is a property of the work in question, irrespective of how it compares to any other works. If the replacement also turns out to be objectionable, just vote it down too. You shouldn’t be downvoting here unless you’d rather the work be eliminated even if there was no replacement.
How? A downvote is a downvote, whether there are 5 or 15 works available for downvoting.
I don’t see that as significantly worse than getting it longlisted, and it’s a lot easier to get nasty stuff longlisted than shortlisted.
An optional round of voting that can be ignored in the absence of griefers, in a way longlist publication can’t. The admins don’t have to contact as many potential finalists (they should have a good idea when something is likely to be eliminated).
Personally, there are times I want to nominate but can’t. Some of us care about the community and the award, but don’t attend religiously like Secret Masters of Fandom do. We are not thinking about saving up and registering for an August convention during the Christmas holidays.
Of course you can say people must register even farther in advance to gain nominating privileges. You can also require people name the greatest SFF authors of all time and deny entry to those who do not correctly spell Yevgeny Zamyatin. Do whatever you want. But people will think about the stated rationales for it. Some will sympathize and others won’t. I’m just saying please don’t neglect to think about what it all looks like outside the File 770 bubble.
@Kurt Busiek:
Wait. That would slice him into a mound of julienne strips!
Also, you have a typo.
@Rail
@Bill: And what does any of this have to do with the conversation as it had evolved before you jumped in advocating for competing slates?
That was in a different thread — why are you bringing it up here? Criticize it over there. (and I was most definitely not advocating it — I put it out for consideration; or re-consideration, as it were)
It looks an awful lot like you’re trying to deliberately derail the conversation here. Maybe looking for quotations to twist into proof that we are who Beale says we are?
You may not believe it, but it was not an attempt to derail or troll. Yes, counter-slates had been rejected, but there has been a lot of evolution of thought since then, and strategies that had been thought effective enough to solve the problem (EPH) have since been shown to be only partially effective, so it may be prudent to reconsider strategies that had been rejected before.
If you don’t think that they are a good idea, then make that argument. But I will submit that if they are an effective way to award quality works in the presence of griefer slates, then they may not be a bad idea. If they in fact will or won’t do that is an open question at this time. People have rejected counter-slates because they don’t like the idea of them (which I completely understand). I haven’t seen any case made that they won’t work, though.
A point in their favor (and this is purely a discussion of how they would work – again, I’m not advocating for them) is that they pull support from works with low numbers of nominations at the small end of the long tail — works that had no chance of making the ballot anyway — into works that are at the bigger end of the long tail — works that presumably would end up in top five of a completely organic ballot — thus giving them sufficient support in the nomination phase that they can conceivably push griefer slate works out of the top five. The slates were effective because they had no long tail.
Consider Best Novella, 2015. The Hugo ended up going to No Award. SP supported 3 works with 338, 338, and 292 votes. RP supported 5 works — the 3 SP works, and two more which got 172 and 145 votes. There were 1083 ballots, so there were something like 745 (1083 – 338) non-slate ballots.
If we presume that all of these SP and RP votes were from slate ballots, then the next 5 works are what would have been (in a non-slate environment) the works that would have had the organic nominations, and they had 124, 104, 103, 95 and 83 votes.
If a slate or slates had formed around these works based on voter preferences (rather than griefer, trolling reasons) — which is entirely possible, since they were the most organically popular works — and work #6 had pulled in 22 long tail votes, it would have bumped Puppy #5 off the list. If slates could have moved 69 votes from the long tail to work #7, it would have bumped Puppy #4 off the list. And so on. To bump all five Puppy works from the list, work #10 would have to slate support of 256 votes beyond what it would have gotten anyway, which might be a bridge too far. But to get the desired end goal — a single Hugo winner with broad organic support — you don’t need to clear all five Puppy works off the short list. You only need one that is good enough to beat the Puppies and No Award.
I think, at a minimum, voter-preference based slates show potential to get at least a few non-slate works with broad organic support onto the ballot in the face of griefer slates without any changes to the voting procedures as they now stand.
Again, I’m not advocating slates, of either kind. But I think it is unwise to reject them based on how they “feel” when they just might work. (And I suspect that they will show effectiveness against second-order trolling [Puppy-driven counter-countermeasures] as well, but don’t quite know how to analyze that as yet.)
Well, yeah. He’s a bard.
Like Cacofonix.
Nuh-uh!
@Bill:
This is an excellent demonstration of why a counter-slate is a disastrous idea.
There were over 4000 nominating ballots this year. If you’re thinking of the number of participants being likely to be lower than 256, what you’re doing is giving disproportionate weight to about 6% of the voting body. There is no reason to expect that those 256 people would have results bearing any similarity whatsoever to the favorite choices of the full 4000.
So all you’ve done is created a new slate, equally non-representative of the wider voting body, and pushed that onto the ballot.
At that point all you can try to argue is “Well, OK, but we’re a nicer, righter non-representative slate.” 😛
—
I see the appeal, and there’s no question that it would be effective for the immediate problem. But it would be effective by assigning hypothetical “people we trust” to do the exact same thing that’s the problem in the first place — and that’s a trust not everybody shares, and that will inevitably erode any time any friction arises. Not a good solution.
Brian Z on May 21, 2016 at 7:57 pm said:
You only have to buy a membership once every three years in order to nominate in all three of those years (if you time your purchase correctly). It’s not really that hard.
And actually, I don’t really mind privileging ongoing, regularly-participating members who make an ongoing, regular effort to remain part of the community of WSFS members. WSFS rules already do this. If you vote on site selection every year, you’re actually paying your WSFS membership dues two years in advance and you also get the opportunity to purchase your attending membership at the lowest possible rate. Keep your membership dues current and you get to vote. You can even fall a year behind and still get to vote, thanks to us allowing members from the previous year to nominate. How difficult is that?
In general, I would expect the members of WSFS who are making an ongoing, regular effort to keep their dues up to date to express more care about how they cast their ballots. Remember, simply expanding the franchise to infinity and beyond isn’t the goal. (If it were, we’d just allow anyone to vote without requiring that they become members.) Yes, that’s elitist. What’s wrong with only wanting people who actually want to be members of WSFS to vote for the WSFS Awards?
@Bill
I’m going to be lazy and repost from last night’s reply to your counter slate proposal:
Slates are anathema because they are completely out of the character of the award. The Hugos ask for fans to nominate the best science fiction of the last year based on their own reading. Slates surrender personal judgement to a preference for winning instead of actually judging quality. Winning is not the end goal of the Hugos. Honoring the best is the goal. Any slate, for any reason, is totally unfit for the purposes the Hugo is trying to achieve. If that is the best we can do then the Hugos are dead.
Of course your heart is in the right place, Kevin, and you do all of this out of love for your community and what it stands for.
Your DN/3SV plans disenfranchise those voters by turning them into second class nominators. I’m sure that from your vantage in SMOF Tower that seems justifiable to Save the Awards from Evil. It may not look good viewed from other angles.
Well, for:
– fans who are not well organized and prepared – I’ve heard those exist 😀
– fans who want to see how it goes without committing for years/decades
– young fans and fans just becoming motivated to join
– fans with financial hardship who may need to raid their food or at least book budgets for a membership
Nothing if that is the WSFS vision. So restrict participation in the Hugos to those who pay annual dues.
Hell, if you write that up, I’ll co-sponsor it, because I’d be glad to see the point clarified.
I see the FUD and trolling about rules changes is the same this year as last.
It’s like “don’t disenfranchise voters” is becoming the new “think of the children!”
Voting for the Hugo award is not some sort of fan human right, it’s a privilege for WSFS members. Non-members have no right to vote. (They can become members, but they can’t vote without becoming members.) People who have a recent membership relation to WSFS but haven’t paid their dues for the current year are allowed to participate in the first step of the voting. But this is a bonus, not a right. To not extend this bonus to the second step of voting is not some horrible human rights violation.
I would say it is a matter of large percentage of the electorate they are. And it wouldn’t be about checking email once a week, it would be about once every month. And this at a time they should be aware that the longlist would be sent.
Johan P, I don’t know things work on your planet.
On Earth, the Hugo nomination ballots may be received and counted, and the Hugo finalists selected, without the participation of a single voter who is now or has ever been a member of the World Science Fiction Society.
It is true that there is one single election organized under the WSFS Constitution that is expressly open to the whole Membership only. And good people on this blog and many others have made repeated, credible proposals to amend the Constitution prevent the majority of them from voting in that one. And I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if they actually pull it off.
In making this insulting dismissal of objections to weakening the voting power of those eligible to nominate, you seem to have missed the fact that, in order for any such amendment to become part of the WSFS Constitution, it would first need to be ratified by people who are not current WSFS Members.
Take your “bonus, not a right” and shove it.
You would not like where he would shove it. But at least it would stop some of the infantile nonsense you continue to pull from your ass.
On my planet, the membership of WSFS and the membership of the upcoming worldcon is the same. And the Hugo award is voted on by members of the upcoming Worldcon. Who are, also, members of WSFS.
And I think this planet is called Earth. Although I might be mistaken – considering the way it’s raining outside today I suppose I might somehow have been transported to the Venus of 1950’s SF.
Also, on my planet concern trolling is consided bad behaviour.
Johan P, that is factually incorrect.
The finalists for the Hugo Awards are determined by a group of people which includes WSFS Members. Also former WSFS Members.
Also people who have never been WSFS Members.
None of their ballots counts any more or less than the others.
The only thing current WSFS Members get to decide by themselves is which of five things they feel least unsatisfied with.
Please read this more carefully.
I sympathize with Kevin Standlee’s wish that the WSFS could be like a society with annual dues. And just doing that would be a cleaner and I suppose more honest solution than mucking about with second stages and disqualifications.
It wouldn’t be a good solution.
And whatever you propose, explain it to those Japanese folks who were members of the 2007 Worldcon and are getting impatient to see another one. Tell the organizers of the Chinese Nebulas who dream Worldcon might someday come to Shanghai. Et cetera.
More immediately, explain it to the people who won’t be helping you choose from a list of five items this summer, but are definitely financially and geographically situated such that they can spend the better part of a week in Helsinki next summer.
It is only the current members that get to vote No Award on nominees. Therefore, it is logical that only the current members are allowed to use the No Award introduced in the second round.
Anyhow, that is for the business meeting to vote on. If concern-trolls are against this, concern-trolls have to argue for this in the business meeting. Because the proposal will be made, regardless of what the concern-trolls think.
My recommendation for the Chinese and Japanese people who want to host a Worldcon is to become members and visit the business meeting to learn about how the administration works. If they aren’t willing to become members, they shouldn’t host a WorldCon.
Proposal will be explained at business meeting. That is what the business meeting is for. If you aren’t willing to go to the business meeting, then it is your problem.
I’m continuing to worry about getting the threshold right for 3SV. If we get it wrong, there are two scenarios:
1) Set too high, fans are unable to muster the votes to remove anything. We will have wasted two more years with nothing to show for it.
2) Set too low, griefers can swoop in and reject the entire longlist, extinguishing the awards entirely.
We can avoid risk #2 simply be declaring that at least 5 works must always go to the final ballot. To avoid risk #1, I think we need the following:
1) Allow any business meeting to change the threshold immediately (that is, taking effect for the following year–not two years later).
2) Publish the exact results of the rejection phase before that meeting. That is, how many people voted overall and how many voted to reject each specific work.
Because the gap between number of griefers and number of organic voters is very large, this concern may be overblown. It could be that any percentage between 10% and 50% would actually work, and so 20% would be quite safe.
Nevertheless, I keep worrying about it. It’s a big part of why I really, really want there to be a gap between the announcement of the longlist and the opening of the rejection phase to allow fans to sign up to be eligible. I like Jameson’s proposal that to be eligible to vote in the rejection phase you must have been eligible to nominate (whether you did or not) and you must be registered for the current WorldCon (either attending or supporting). That should make it impossible for griefers to boost their numbers by recruiting outsiders at the last minute, but it makes it fairly easy for fans to rally against a surprise attack.
Y’know, I’ve never even seen SMOF Towers (though I hear it’s all fancy like), but I have seen the home page of WSFS.org, where it says
So… people who’ve paid for membership at Worldcon are WSFS members. And only people who’ve paid for membership at Worldcon. And people who’ve paid for membership at Worldcon are the only people who can vote on that Worldcon’s Hugos. And if all people who are paid-up members of Worldcon are WSFS members, and only members of Worldcon can vote on the Hugos… well, it’s a perfectly simple problem in set theory, right? The intersection of the two sets (current WSFS members and eligible Hugo voters) is equal to the union of the two sets, so the two sets are equal. If you’re a Hugo voter, you’re a WSFS member. If you’re not a WSFS member, you’re not eligible to vote in the Hugos.
The only proposal I’ve seen on the table so far which might affect that is the one that bad actors should have their memberships cancelled. (And I don’t agree with that, myself, based on the fundamental difficulty of identifying bad actors. Sure, we have a bunch of them now wearing “I Am A Bad Actor” T-shirts that light up at night, but that need not always be the case.)
Other than that… the proposals disenfranchise no one that I can see. Currently, there’s a first stage and a final stage; current and some previous members of WSFS can nominate in the first stage, current members can vote in the final stage. The proposal is to create an intermediate stage – right now, nobody has any rights in that stage, as it, y’know, doesn’t exist. Consequently, nobody can be deprived of any rights in respect of that stage. Some people, if it gets implemented, will have the additional right of making a choice at the intermediate stage, and it’s worth discussing who they’ll be.
(And some people will be affected by cut-off dates relating to eligibility… but that’s always going to be the case, and it’s hardly worth hand-wringing over. It’s possible right now for someone to go and buy a Midamericon II membership but not be allowed to nominate, because nominations are closed. That’s not a tragic violation of their rights, that’s just simple practicality.)
I have reluctantly come around to accepting the idea of 3SV after days of thought, reading threads, and asking questions. Judging from my own perspective and what others have expressed, this is going to be a tough sell to get through two Business Meetings.
The question should be worded positively to emphasize what we are accepting as worthy to pass on to the final ballot, instead of what we are rejecting. I know that would make it more palatable for me. That is actually how Kevin worded it above, but I lost sight of that in all the discussion of downvoting, disqualifying, objecting, and rejecting. I would put something like this at the top of the ballot: “Do you accept the following for consideration on the Final Hugo Ballot?” And then have the choice of yes/no/abstain after each semi-finalist.
It needs to be very clear how it will be reflective of the overall judgement of the participants, and emphasize that it will be very difficult to turn this against things that most people feel are worthy for consideration — however that’s going to work.
I’ve said this before, but I think it will be great to see everything that made the top 15 before the final ballot. I don’t care if they start calling themselves Hugo Semi-Finalists, if this stage returns more honor to being a Hugo Finalist.
And I’ll also say again that I think making the process of contacting potential finalists and determining eligibility more open and transparent is another very good reason for having a semi-final round.
Also, it can’t be said enough that a big reason for this round is to return the former rarity of an entire category getting No Award. We want to have 5 things that are worthy of consideration whether any of them are our personal favorites or not. EPH can get us a better longlist, and 3SV can get us a better shortlist.
It was hard for me to let go of DN and then 3SV+1, but I’ve decided they’re just not practical. If something just hasn’t gotten enough recognition by the end of 1st round nominations, then it’s too bad, but it’s too late.
One issue people have identified is that, to give the current Hugo admins and this year’s membership the widest latitude in safeguarding the health of the awards, it may help to change the constitution to define the subsequent-year nomination privileges as a membership type that conveys to the next Worldcon and puts you under the sway of that next Worldcon’s rules and processes. That is, right now people are casting the situation, presumably accurately, as:
a) I pay for a membership in Worldcon 1. This gives me nominating rights for the Hugos to be presented at Worldcon 2, but I am not a member of Worldcon 2, and Worldcon 2’s rules and processes do not apply to me. Perhaps I am still, during the nomination period for the Worldcon 2 Hugos, under the sway of Worldcon 1’s rules and processes, and perhaps if Worldcon 1 admins were able to find the time to adjudicate a case involving me during the Worldcon 2 Hugo nomination period they could, even though they figured the huge amount of work they had to do to make Worldcon 1 a success was supposed to be over now. But even were that to happen, and despite the fact that I have enjoyed all of my accrued privileges of membership except this last bit of it (nominating for the Worldcon 2 Hugos), surely if they decide to kick me out or yank my ballot I am entitled to a full refund.
Many people are talking like that is the case, and some of them are qualified to have an opinion. So let’s assume it’s true. Change the situation, via appropriate language, to:
b) I buy a membership in Worldcon 1. This gives me full privileges to Worldcon 1 (attending or supporting as appropriate), plus a nominating membership in Worldcon 2, worth a defined value TBD under advice of legal counsel. (There can be tax or regulatory reasons why you can’t call it “free,” but the goal would be to define the value as cheaplly as permitted.) My nominating membership in Worldcon 2 gives me the right to nominate for the Hugo Awards according to the rules and codes in effect for Worldcon 2, and puts me under the sway of Worldcon 2’s admins and subject to its code of conduct. The Worldcon 1 admins don’t have to worry about me any more. The value of my nominating membership defines any refund I am entitled to if the admins revoke my nominating membership without cause.
This closes an apparent loophole giving subsequent-year nominators effective impunity under condition (a). Once it’s in place, no one can say they weren’t told.
Steve Wright,
I’ll say it a different way. Currently, members of the past and future Worldcons participate in the selection of finalists on 100 percent equal footing with members of the current Worldcon (who are known also as “WSFS Members”). All of their ballots count 100 percent equally in determining what will appears on the final ballot.
With DN, current Worldcon members say to WSFS members past and future, “Gee, thanks for your suggestions, guys, but actually, we’ve got this. We’ll take it from here.”
With 3SV, current Worldcon members say, “Hey, thanks! Hmm, let’s see… I really hate that one, that’s out… these suck, they have to go, well I guess those seem OK, let’s go with those.”
If it is done for a positive reason, sure, understandable. Telling people they can no longer participate in the whole process of selecting finalists unless they pay dues every single year, and on top of that need to pay them by around Christmas of the previous year at the latest, specifically because you need an extra two months so that you can throw out their ballots, is probably going to be less effective in encouraging fans who are not regular participants to get involved. I’m not sure if that’s what you want.
First, who is proposing “weakening the voting power of those eligible to nominate”? Those eligible to nominate who are also eligible to vote would have the same, nay, stronger if +1 is authorized, voting power. Those eligible to nominate who are not eligible to vote cannot have their voting power weakened, as you can’t weaken “zero”.
Second, it would first need to be ratified by people who, at the time of ratification, will be current WSFS Members. The US Presidential election will be voted in by people who are not current US citizens too, but by the time of the election they will be citizens, and registered to vote. And the election in 2040 will be voted in by people WHO AREN’T EVEN BORN YET. Oh the humanity!
And yes, WSFS is a society with annual dues. The dues go up closer to the annual deadline, but that’s how WSFS is structured. FUD much?
Hmm, I wanted to add a blank line to make my paragraphing more clear, and I seem to not have an edit button any more.
Here’s a proposal I’ve not seen suggested, but which has the virtue of simplicity and directness.
1) By 2/3 majority vote, a business meeting may ban (with immediate effect) individuals, companies, web sites or other entities from eligibility to be nominated for the Hugo Awards. Bans may be indefinite or for periods of time.
2) The Admins will disqualify any nomination of a banned entity or any work created, co-created, or originally published or produced by a banned entity. The ban has no effect except at nomination time.
3) By a 2/3 majority vote, a business meeting may rescind a ban, with immediate effect.
4) The initial banned list is
a) Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale), indefinitely
b) Castalia House, indefinitely
This has the advantage of simplicity and that it cuts straight to the heart of the problem. There are no thresholds to worry about, no arcane algorithms to try to explain. It adds little to the admin burden, and gives them clear, easy-to-follow directions.
Which is, of course, TOTALLY DIFFERENT from how current Worldcon members RIGHT NOW in the voting round can say “I really hate this one, leave it off my ballot…these suck, put them just under No Award, well I guess this seems OK, let’s put it above No Award.”
@Greg Hullender:
Yeah, that’s the sticking point. Really, 3SV isn’t a “second-best” solution in econ terms, it’s a third-best solution. Second-best is some kind of administrative authority to toss out obvious bad-guy ballots.
One complaint is that, “This would change the character of the awards!” But guess what? The character of the awards has already changed. Say that again: The character of the awards has already changed. The question before us is how and whether to change them from what they have become – the plaything of griefers – to something worthy of the Hugo tradition from the early ’50s through the early ’10s.
The other complaint is that, “The admins won’t want the power. Indeed, we’ll never find a pool of admins willing to wield it.” Which is simply to say that the pool of admins, too, must decide what responsibility they are willing to accept to safeguard that tradition.
Without any affirmative decision but simply the march of time, the Hugos have become an internet poll in the era of Boaty McBoatface, Free Republic and chan culture. It was reasonable, ex. ante, to believe that the gating function of a supporting membership fee would proof the award against the sort of shenanigans endemic to the social web. Experience has falsified that hope. The two questions before us now are, 1) Will we admit this to ourselves? and 2) What are we willing to do about it?
Let’s be really clear.
Non-WSFS Members are eligible to select the Hugo finalists. Period.
The ones who were WSFS Member last year. The ones who have registered for an upcoming Worldcon.
All of them have equal voting power to current Members in the election to selects the Hugo finalists. Period.
@Brian Z: Yes, that has been the case. We are talking about changing that so that they have a degree of control but not the final say. Things change.
Of course it is totally different. Without the nomination poll to select finalists (in which the non-WSFS Members are 100 percent equal to WSFS Members), you wouldn’t have a ballot to No Award in the first place.
Greg: That wouldn’t help even a tiny bit. All it would do would be to make Beale jump up and down and energize his followers to put more libel on the ballot. Libel not directly published by him.
So the question becomes, what are the reasons why it is a good idea extending the power to choose the final ballot to the WSFS members of the previous and, more recently, the subsequent years? And are those reasons no longer important?
With 3SV, current Worldcon members say, “Hey, thanks! Hmm, let’s see… I really hate that one, that’s out… these suck, they have to go, well I guess those seem OK, let’s go with those.”
Yup! And this is different from a jungle primary followed by an election how?
Brian Z:
That is exactly as it works today. Previous and next years members nominate and then the current years members say, “thank you for your nominations, now we’ve got this. We will vote on which ones that are not worthy (No Awarded) and which ones we think should win.
Also, I think you meant 3SV and not DN.
Which is, of course, TOTALLY DIFFERENT
Of course it is totally different. Without the nomination poll to select finalists (in which the non-WSFS Members are 100 percent equal to WSFS Members), you wouldn’t have a ballot to No Award in the first place.
So? That has nothing to do with it. You’re complaining that WSFS members can downvote stuff that was nominated that they hate and upvote stuff that was nominated that they like. They can do that RIGHT NOW. At least with 3SV, since they’d be working with a longer list, there’s a higher chance of being able to award a winner at the end of the process.
And you know, we’d still have a ballot even without the non-WSFS member nominations. Historically, we used to have ballots with NO non-WSFS member nominations.
Aaaand, without an edit button I can’t fix the blockquoting of the above. Sorry, all.
edit to add: Hmm, the edit button is showing up in Chrome. But not Iceweasel. Maybe I’ll have to change browsers I read File770 in.
Jim Henley, I like your proposal re: formalizing nominating membership carryover. I am VERY MUCH NOT a lawyer, and I’d like to see some lawyers weighing in on this, but to my mind it’s a commonsense delineation of terms and obligations, that might help future Worldcons with liabilityheadaches/lawsuits.
I do think that you’d want to make the “nominating membership” explicitly not transferable to another party.
That is true, and I have never said anything else.
What I have said, however, is that while two groups of not-members-right-now are allowed to participate in the nomination – which is one step in the selection of a winner, but not the actual voting for a winner – this does not give them any inherent right to participate in other stages. You seem to consider this a horrible statement, and you attempt to imply that it’s “factually incorrect”, but so far you have not actually provided any arguments against it.
(I will also note that the percentage of eligible nominators who have never been WSFS member are almost certainly low – probably close to 0%. Yes, it’s theoretically possible, but there’s few of them. Making a big deal out of that group, and showing concern for them, is a prime example of derailing and concern trolling.)
As Steve Wright points out, 3SV introduces a new stage in the voting. Noone have their right to vote in this stage taken away.
@Cally
Well, there we disagree. I think it would destroy 90% of what motivates him to do it, and then the whole problem would go away. It would also discourage other publishers from trying to game the system a similar way.
@Brian Z:
Your question fails to interest me in the terms you put it.
I think he’d be doing it, or something like it, even if he weren’t a publisher. And I think there’s nothing to prevent other non-publishers to do the same thing.