Donald Eastlake III has sent File 770 a copy for publication of a motion submitted to the Glasgow 2024 Business Meeting.
“Site Selection by the Worldcon Community” restricts site selection voter eligibility to those who have purchased the required membership and either (1) vote in person, (2) have cast a valid vote in the site selection that selected the administering convention, or (3) attended the previous year’s Worldcon or cast a valid vote in the site selection administered by the previous year’s Worldcon.
SHORT TITLE: SITE SELECTION BY THE WORLDCON COMMUNITY
Moved, to amend the WSFS Constitution by adding text in Article 4 as follows:
Section 4.2: Voter Eligibility.
4.2.1: Voting shall be limited to WSFS members who have purchased at least a supporting membership[1] in the Worldcon whose site is being selected and meet one of the following criteria:
- Vote in person at the administering convention,
- Have cast a valid vote in the site selection that selected the administering convention, or
- Have attended the previous year’s Worldcon or cast a valid vote in the Worldcon site selection administered by the previous year’s Worldcon.
Worldcons shall make available to the following Worldcon the information necessary to confirm criteria 3 above. Ballots that do not meet any of these criteria will be processed as if voted for “No Preference”.
Section 4.1: Voting.
4.1.2: Voting shall be by written ballot cast either by mail or at the current Worldcon with tallying as described in Section 6.4. Votes cast by mail must arrive at least 15 days before the end of on-site voting or they will be processed as if voted for “No Preference”.
PROPOSED BY: Donald E. Eastlake III, Jill Eastlake, Kevin Standlee, Tim Szczesuil
COMMENTARY: The most critical decisions made by the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS), the decisions with potentially the longest-term effects, are the selection of future Worldcon sites and committees and the amendment of the WSFS Constitution. This amendment addresses the first of these, site selection, which also affects the second because selected convention committees have significant control over the WSFS Business Meeting as well as the Hugo Award and site selection they administer.
The sponsors of this amendment trust the Worldcon Community to make the site selection decision. What is the Worldcon Community? In an approximate and general sense, it is those whose work and participation over the past 85 years has made the Worldcon what it is and given it value. These are, overwhelmingly, people who have attended the Worldcon. And, until the selection of Chengdu, they were the bulk of the site selection voters.
But under the present rules, the Worldcon is, in effect, available for purchase. Since modern day science fiction fans are common and ubiquitous, for at most a couple of hundred thousand dollars, a small amount for any substantial business or government entity wanting the prestige of a Worldcon, that entity can solicit voters, pay some or all the fees for them, get their vote counted, and win site selection. And when they win, they get the voting fees back.
This amendment tries to make the least restrictive change that it can while substantially improving the chances that the Worldcon Community will dominate site selection. It also provides for an earlier deadline for mail in ballots since it is very hard to do any checking when an avalanche of ballots arrive near the close of voting. It has no effect on who can vote on the Hugo Awards or on Business Meeting participation which are controlled by other rules.
This amendment includes as voters those who will have voted/attended recently. If this amendment is passed in Glasgow and ratified in Seattle, to participate in the site selection administered by the 2026 Worldcon a member of that Worldcon would have to pay the advance membership fee for 2028 and either vote in person at the 2026 Worldcon, have attended the 2025 Worldcon, have cast a valid ballot in the site selection administered by the 2025 Worldcon for 2027, or cast a valid ballot in 2024 for the selection of the 2026 Worldcon. Looking further into the future, a new voter who has never voted in site selection will have to attend either the Worldcon where the vote is being held or the previous Worldcon. However, once they have voted they can continue to vote in site selection without attending another Worldcon as long as they continue to vote with no more than a one year gap in voting.
[1] This “supporting membership” is part of the current Constitution. Business Passed On from Chengdu, Item 3 (Short Title: Consistent Change) will, if ratified in Glasgow, change this to “WSFS membership”.
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There’s only one problem with this: “Post(destroying)Master DeJoy” in the US. I still haven’t received all of my bills for this month, and sometimes won’t for up to another week. And that’s from corporate mass mailings.
I’ve been able to attend precisely one WorldCon…the one that was local to me. In future, somebody who can’t afford to attend WorldCon unless it’s local will have no way to influence it being local so they can, in fact, afford to attend.
Ultimately, this would restrict WorldCon to the wealthy west…to North America and Europe. Somebody could volunteer for multiple WorldCons, but not be allowed to vote in site selection because they volunteered and attended virtually.
I don’t want WorldCon to be bought either, but this doesn’t seem like an answer. It seems like a way to dismiss the efforts of the people who have helped create virtual and hybrid WorldCons and to limit the con geographically in the future.
As someone who has never attended Worldcon in person (and probably won’t) but has been a virtual and supporting member for many years, I think there should be some path for future supporting/virtual members to participate in site selection too. I vote in site selection because I care about where the Hugos are held. I would hate to lose this right if for some reason I’m unable to participate for a couple years. And I can’t even vote against this change since that’s limited to in person Business Meeting attendees.
Could be improved with something like
Have had sustaining or better memberships to two of the previous five Worldcons
Does “attend” include virtual attendance?
How does this build a community?
How does it create sustainability and welcome those who want to participate more – when they can?
Where’s the World in Worldcon.
This excludes people and restricts the constituency, it’s the opposite to community, in my view.
And more names associated with the Chengdu failures.
Ballot stuffing is not new in fandom.
A much better solution, a simple is to consider the TAFF approach where. “A candidate must also receive at least 20% of the first-place votes on both sides of the Atlantic to win.”
Now this concept can easily be applied to a Worldcon voting system, the percentage could change but it could be a long the lines of
“A Worldcon bid must receive at least 20% from their country and 20% from outside their country”
Needs reflection.
Someone actually clever could work out what’s fair and sensible. The percentages and whether it should be first place vote.
This could prevent ballot stuffing from a given country. I reckon.
But let’s be honest. If the ballsology and gobshitery that occured again at DC or on the MPC, it won’t matter.
Did Kevin Standlee got more votes from attendees at DC for Chengdu than anyone else?
I reckon so.
I expected fans to do what’s right, following the fiasco of the last 24 months, and I never expected the judgement of fans would be to penalise new countries, new fans to Worldcon, eschew new horizons, effectively defending those who were responsible and not just passing blame arbitrarily elsewhere but also imposing unfair consequences.
Cut from the TAFF website.
Voting system
TAFF uses a preferential voting system similar to the system used in voting for the Hugo Awards. Voters should rank candidates in order of preference. If necessary, the lowest-ranked candidates will be eliminated from the race and those votes redistributed in subsequent rounds according to the next ranking until one candidate has a clear majority. A candidate must also receive at least 20% of the first-place votes on both sides of the Atlantic to win. Any candidate failing to receive this minimum percentage on either side will be dropped, and the second-place votes on their ballots counted as first-place votes in the next ballot count. (Note: In years with more than three candidates, this rule is not applied until after the candidates with the fewest votes have been eliminated and just three candidates are left.) Votes will be counted according to a voter’s contact address, rather than by where they send their ballot. Votes from fans not resident in either Europe or North America will not count toward either side of the Atlantic for the purpose of this rule (but are nonetheless encouraged, of course).
I think the many Chinese fans who voted for a Worldcon in China wanted to be part of the Worldcon community. Then they were let down terribly. They feel betrayed. It wasn’t their fault.
James B wrote:
“Did Kevin Standlee got more votes from attendees at DC for Chengdu than anyone else?
“I reckon so.”
Kevin had nothing to do with.Chengdu. He was a member of the Canadian bid.
@Linda: I think he’s suggesting that Kevin’s support of the Winnipeg bid led to votes for Chengdu.
Linda,
I assume James B is saying that Kevin’s actions as a member of the Canada bid possibly inspired some people to vote against them. At least for “none of the above” if not for Chengdu.
I truly doubt that’s the case. The votes for Chengdu came mostly from China, and I doubt they knew who Kevin was..
I know I heard a few folks saying they wished they had voted for none of the above instead of Canada after their (not just Kevin’s) actions at DC.
At any rate, I do like the idea of a Fan Fund model requiring a certain amount of votes from both local and non-local to the bid.
@James B:
For reference, Chengdu got about 10% of the in-person ballots at Discon:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220123051444/https://discon3.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Worldcon2023SiteSelectTally.pdf
They got 56 votes out of 549 valid w/preference or 564 valid incl. no preference. And there were a whopping 6 NOTA votes.
So even if you want to stipulate that Kevin netted votes for Chengdu, something that I don’t agree with, the number of votes that he /could/ have incited at-con (where most of the issues were) was minimal given the final totals.
@Laura: I at least like X% of “not local” ballots. Not a majority, but some share. Perhaps 25% on a first preference, with something similar to the TAFF rule (perhaps only counting ballots expressing a preference for either a filed candidate or NOTA)?
I am not a WSFS member nor ever attended any Worldcon or science fiction convention in my life.
Nevertheless, as an overseas born “??” (ethnic Chinese) I will comment thus: I indepently over the past weeks/months, thought of the idea of a calculation similar to the 20% vote threshold but instead of bidders-it could be 40% of attending members site selection votes needed for a winning bid.
It’s a way of gauging how much support in the Worldcon attending community a bid has, I have been unable to find tallies for the winning Nippon 2007 Worldcon, the 2020 CoNZealand Worldcon and various other non-US/America hosted Worldcons; or even US/Canada Worldcons-it’s fairly hidden how many voted for each bid(or at least it’s opaque to me).
To me, it’s simpler than adjusting how many percent of a bidding country needs to marshall it’s own country votes or previous attending/supporting members’ votes.
This has its own pros and cons of course, but it seems that the status quo is not going to remain the same anymore-so why not gauge the support of attending members, who should be the most viable attendees of the winning bid.
It also seems that, unlike Locus magazine-Worldcon doesn’t have ongoing statistics of who its attendees are; ie who attends consecutively and so on and so forth.
That’s all the comment I have to make for now(unless a Worldcon bid materializes nearby with travel/lodging within my budget).
I think this is potentially a problem for European bids
There are other proposed solutions which I think will be put before the meeting. If so will the Business Meeting administrators flag to the attendees that there are alternatives. The attendees will probably want to support the alternative they prefer rather than voting yes or no on each, which is a process that can go wrong when most people’s second choice is rejected and then whatever was expected to be the first choice is also unexpectedly defeated
This is garbage. It screams of not wanting the ‘wrong people’ voting. If anything, we should make it easier and looser, encouraging more people from more areas to vote, which by its very nature would make it a bunch harder to buy. I
get it, y’all are annoyed because Chengdu out performed Winnipeg with their livestreams and gathering of votes, but this ain’t the way to go about fixing it. I do kinda like the Home-and-Away vote percentage idea.
James B wrote “A much better solution, a simple is to consider the TAFF approach where. “A candidate must also receive at least 20% of the first-place votes on both sides of the Atlantic to win.”
“Now this concept can easily be applied to a Worldcon voting system, the percentage could change but it could be a long the lines of
“A Worldcon bid must receive at least 20% from their country and 20% from outside their country”
There is room to debate the exact percentage, but an elegant solution to worrying about which human rights list to use and where to put the cutoff. If a bad actor or voter buyer etc. comes along they’ll have to appeal to the rest of world to win, and cannot simply relay on home country votes.
I’m surprised that we haven’t had a convention and visitors bureau figure out that for $300,000 dollars they can get 5 or 6 thousand people to come to town and spend money for a week. It’s a guaranteed money winner.
Like Chris Garcia’s shorthand “home and away” name.
Hear! Hear! Anyone who cares about Worldcon and the Hugos should be encouraged to vote regardless of whether they attend or not.
This isn’t about the “wrong people” voting.
This is about the current system relying on everyone being on the honor system about whether the votes coming in are from actual people.
While we can’t say with any certainty that all of the last-minute Chengdu votes that were basically just a name, e-mail address and money were all fake, it’s at least worth thinking about the fact that if the people funding that endeavor had wanted to just spend the money to buy site selection, there was nothing that stopped that and no way to tell if it happened.
The current system is that there is no verification that anyone voting in site selection is a real person. A moment’s thought about the difficulty of determining whether a ballot being cast in the name of some random person in another country is both identifying a real person and the actual person casting the vote explains why that is the case.
Validating someone’s existence by noting that they once attended a Worldcon in person (either this one, the directly-previous one, or one in the past that they have an unbroken chain of site selection votes for the years after) seems completely reasonable to me.
The basic problem in any of the “how can we fix Worldcon” discussions is “What do you mean by ‘we’?” Rule by elites fell on its face, because it was the elites who fucked everything up. Rule by grassroots has the problem that our numbers are small enough that it’s really easy to astroturf things.
Every decision about WSFS rules are being made solely by those who are physically at that year’s Worldcon… which has its issues, but is somewhat the least-worst option.
Defining the category of people who are making the very crucial decision as to where to hold a Worldcon (and hence, the WSFS business meeting as well) by basing it on whether they’ve ever attended a Worldcon in-person before, feels like it’s striking a very reasonable balance.
MixMat on July 17, 2024 at 12:55 pm said:
Site Selection results are usually included in the minutes of the WSFS Business meeting held N years before the year of the convention, where N depends upon what the site selection voting lead time was at the time. (N has historically varied between 1 and 3 years.) You can look up those minutes (when a copy has been made available to the WSFS website team) at the WSFS Rules Archives.
2005 (for 2007 Nippon): The minutes say “Report was attached to minutes” but unfortunately, the Secretary of that meeting did not include them in the document submitted to WSFS.org. I chaired that meeting, but my personal records (presumably including that report) are buried in a box somewhere and I don’t plan to go looking for it anytime soon, as I leave for my Worldcon trip one week from today. If anyone else can locate a copy of that document, let me know and I’ll update the website.
2018 (for 2020 New Zealand): See page 58 of the 2018 WSFS Business Meeting minutes. New Zealand ran unopposed and received 643 of the 693 votes expressing a preference.
Randall Shepherd on July 17, 2024 at 10:45 pm said:
I do think that if we were to implement such a rule, it would need to explicitly require that we have to mark each ballot with the country from which is was cast. That is because the Business Meeting in 1995 passed BM-1995-01: “It is the sense of WSFS that it is inappropriate for a Worldcon Committee to gather additional demographic data on the site-selection and/or the Hugo Award ballot beyond that which is required by the WSFS Constitution, or useful for the efficient administration of the balloting.” (See the current Resolutions and Rulings of Continuing Effect, pp. 19-20.)
So at least in 1995, the Business Meeting thought it was a bad idea to do anything to tally how ballots were cast by country (or site selection rotation zone, as it existing in 1995).
Particularly inasmuch as, based on the precedent of the 2023 election held in 2021, it apparently would be just fine for hundred or thousands of voters to be registered with nothing more than an email address (potentially all of them from the same email address) a few days before the election ended, with ballots cast by them (again, with nothing more than an email address). Anyone who questioned this would be pilloried and declared persona non grata by the Great and the Good for daring to suggest that there was anything at all wrong about this practice.
Yeah, “the people who made worldcon are those who attended worldcon” is only going to EXCLUDE more people. A lot of us are fans but cant AFFORD to attend. And even beyond money, many countries ask visas and can deny you for no reason. Barring us from voting also prevents worldcons to be held at places where we CAN attend.
There’s a part of the Worldcon population that would be quite happy to exclude us peons who can’t afford to attend a Worldcon that isn’t local, unfortunately.
A “Home and Away” requirement would make it harder to buy a Worldcon without limiting which members count as “part of the community” based on wealth.
And a workable human rights provision would eliminate the bad actors that (I hope) we most care about.
I appreciate what folks are trying to do here, but if the core concern is preventing Worldcon from being hosted in a country which cannot commit to protecting and honoring freedom of expression and freedom of conscience (including LGBTQ+ identity), this is not a parsimonious way of addressing that concern. And it looks like it would create a tremendous amount of work for the administering convention committee, which would inevitably catch unearned hell if they find they can’t get records from previous years, or find flaws or anomalies in the records they receive.
I share others’ distaste with the idea of doubling down on governance by elites whose proof of fidelity is measured by expenditures of money. Most of all though I wouldn’t want to be in the position of telling local fans in a place where Worldcon hasn’t been before, or hasn’t been in generations, that we won’t count their vote in favor of joining our community and traditions.
The site selection for Nippon 2007 (Yokohama) took place in 2004, as that was the last three-years-in-advance site selection.
The results of that selection, in which Yokohama won over Columbus, can be found at https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/Noreascon%204/x04-tg12a.pdf or https://fancyclopedia.org/2007_Worldcon_Site_Selection .
Thanks for the links. It was closer than I remembered.
Joshua K: I will add that to wsfs.org when I get a chance. Thank you.
I find this measure to be unnecessary. I suspect that a country is not going to try this again and a corporation would not be interested.
I’m sorry, but this is not a good way to increase membership and interest in the Worldcon. If anything this will make Worldcon seem more elitist and closed.