Apparently, we are not able to get through an awards season without Hugo drama and Worldcon drama in general. Especially since I really don’t have time for this right now, cause I have to prepare for three cons where I’m on programming, plus I’m still trying to write a story every day and I also have to work to pay for food, power (just ordered the yearly supply of oil for the furnace), books, toys, Worldcons and other essentials.
So since I’m busy, this is going to be a fairly short post, amended as and if necessary.
Earlier today, in the Hugo finalist Discord (which I founded, so I’m active there, even though I’m not a finalist this year), finalists were talking about receiving an e-mail about a virtual town hall meeting for all finalists that was set up on short notice. These virtual meetings are not unusual and usually involve logistical issues and since I’m not a finalist this year, I didn’t pay much attention.
Anyway, it turns out that the Glasgow Hugo administration team dropped a bombshell at this virtual town hall meeting and later also in a public statement, which can be found here. There’s also a YouTube video of the statement by 2024 Hugo administrator Nichlas Whyte, which has some additional information.
Basically, it turned out that there had been an attempt to stuff the Hugo ballot by someone or rather someones buying a large number of supporting membership with blatantly false names like several variations of the same name (John L. Smith, John S. Smith, Joan Smith, Joanne Smith, J. Smith, etc…) as well as consecutive numbers. These fake members bullet-voted for a particular finalist and generally submitted very unusual ballots.
The Hugo team caught this and disqualified 377 obviously fraudulent votes altogether, which is almost ten percent of the total. The finalist who was the beneficiary these fraudulent votes was not disqualified and has not been publicly named, since there is no evidence that they were aware of any of this.
This is obviously a big deal and even though there have been attempts to game finalists onto the ballot before, I don’t think any person, entity or group has ever attempted to manipulate the final voting, since it takes many more votes to win a Hugo than to make the ballot. Also, a supporting a.k.a. WSFS membership costs 50 US-dollars, so this is also quite expensive – roughly 19000 US-dollars – so whoever is behind this has deep pockets. Thankfully, they were also clumsy and didn’t even consider using a name generator or otherwise hiding their trail.
I applaud Nicholas Whyte and the Glasgow Hugo team for transparency in what must have been a difficult decision, because Hugo ballots are not disqualified lightly, and also for keeping the name of the finalist in question out of this.
That said, speculations are obviously flying high, both among finalists and the general public. I’ve been told that some of the fake member names were visible on the public membership list until fairly recently and I have seen screenshots, but most of those names seem to have been removed. The list of countries of origin of Worldcon members broken down into membership categories is also interesting.
John/ErsatzCulture noticed the membership weirdness some time ago and took screenshots, which he shared on Twitter. He also points out that the Glasgow statement refers merely to a finalist and notes that there are more Hugo categories than just the fiction categories.
Of course, this is all just speculation. We don’t know who the finalist in question is, though we can make some educated guesses, and we will probably be able to tell for sure when the detailed voting data is released, though the fraudulent ballots have been removed.
ETA: John/ErsatzCulture also tweeted that it’s possible to make an educated guess about who the finalist in question might be by checking out the number and range of nominations needed to make ballot that was released with the finalist announcement, because there is a notable outlier in one category. Though again, we have no way of knowing for sure and there is also no indication that this finalist was aware of what was going on.
ETA 07-24-2024: Heather Rose Jones has taken up John/ErsatzCulture’s suggestion and compared the 2024 Hugo nomination data we have at this point (the full nomination data won’t be released until after the Hugo ceremony) to previous years and found that two categories – Best Fancast and Best Related – did receive more nominations than usual for those categories and had outliers, where one finalist received a lot of nominations. However, Heather also points out that this isn’t without precedent and that there have been previous examples where the Hugo electorate had a strong preference for one finalist who received a lot more nominations than the next finalist. So in short, something shady might be up or it might be that a lot of people organically nominated one particular finalist. At this point, it’s too early to tell.
Also, as I said in my coverage of the 2023 Hugo mess, it’s never a great idea to try to screw with a community that does data analysis for fun, because you’ll not only get caught, but they’ll probably catch the Worldcon member who filled out a ballot on behalf of their cat, too, while they’re at it. And last year’s and this year’s attempt to manipulate the Hugo votes were so clumsy that it’s amazing anybody thought they could get away with this.
ETA 07-24-2024: Another theory is that this might be a case of betting fraud, since a betting website is offering betting on the Hugo winners for Best Novel, Best Graphic Story and Best Fancast. Best Fancast is one of the two outlier categories identified by Heather Rose Jones. Of course, you can bet on pretty much anything, if you’re so inclined, and besides, the betting website wrongly credits the Publishing Rodeo fancast to Steven Soderbergh rather than to Sunyi Dean and Scott Drakeford, who actually run it.
There is some discussion about this issue in the comments at File 770 and Camestros Felapton’s blog.
Also, considering a WSFS membership includes privileges other than Hugo voting, may I remind you to vote in site selection for the 2026 Worldcon this year, if you’re an attending or supporting Worldcon member. The race seems uncontested, since the only bid is for Los Angeles, California, but write-ins are a possibility.
ETA 2: The latest round of Hugo drama has reached the Guardian. The headline of Sian Cain’s article is misleading, since it says that the fraudulent votes were intended to benefit a writer. However, the statement by the Glasgow Hugo team only uses the term “finalist” and never specifies that the finalist in question is a writer, since there are Hugo categories which are not for written works.
ETA 07-24-2024: The latest round of Hugo drama has reached CNN, a news outlet I don’t recall covering the Hugos in previous years. There is an article by Louis Mian and the Hugo drama is also included in CNN‘s “Five Things” brief news round-up.
ETA 2 07-24-2024: The Bookseller also has an article by Maia Snow about the Hugo fraud attempt. This one doesn’t say anything new, though it’s interesting that the illustration is a bin of used Star Trek tie-in novels. Nothing against Star Trek tie-in novels – I think a lot of us read and enjoyed them back in the day – but it’s not really an ideal illustration for an article about the Hugo Awards.
ETA 3 07-24-2024: At Polygon, Tasha Robinson has a pretty extensive article about the current Hugo drama as well as a rundown of previous Hugo messes. The Polygon article also appears on the Spanish site Zona Gamer and the German site News Text Area in what appears to be a machine-translation (or a not very good human translation). Found via trackbacks to my site.
ETA 1 07-26-2024: BookRiot also has an article about the 2024 Hugo scandal with references to previous scandals.
ETA 2 07-26-2024: At Comics Beat, Dean Simons has an article about the 2024 Hugo voting fraud scandal with the depressing headline “Another year, Another scandal”.
ETA 4 07-26-2024: Mark McDougall reports about the 2024 Hugo voting fraud scandal for the Scottish newspaper The Herald.
ETA 07-25-2024: The Brazilian news site O Globo also has an article about the 2024 attempted Hugo fraud. Found via 2024 Nebula and Ignyte finalist Renan Bernardo.
Finally, in other, better news, the finalists for the 2024 Ignyte Awards have been announced today. I don’t cover the Ignytes in detail in this blog, because I have only so much bandwidth, but they alway have interesting finalists, including some that are overlooked by other genre awards. I’m particularly happy to see my good friends of the Simultaneous Times podcast on the Ignyte ballot this year.
sending...
Good reminder about the importance of site selection voting!
Although in this case, I don’t know. ISTM that if there was some group organized and staffed enough, with a facility, they’d have already made the ballot. Or at least been making a lot of noise online to drum up support.
But remember that voting in site selection gets you a supporting membership to the winner, and you get to be a Hugo voter!
It might be nothing, but apparently the LA Worldcon bid was worried about a write-in campaign well before the Hugo thing broke. And a campaign doesn’t necessarily need to be visible to everybody. Chengdu drummed up a lot of support online, but since they did it on Chinese Social Media, is was largely invisible to western fandom. I could probably run a write-in campaign for a German Worldcon and not be noticed by English speaking fandom, if I did it in German (don’t worry, I’m not). Not saying that this is what’s going on here, but voting in site selection is a good idea in general, because it gets you a supporting membership and Hugo voting rights.
I am so impressed at how the Hugo team is handling things this year. Smart and transparent as possible.
I am so NOT impressed with whoever thought up this dumb scheme. Did they really think no one would notice their dumb method? Even Puppies had a better plan!
I suppose we’ll know after the awards who they were shilling for, but since they didn’t know, it’s right not to let the name go out now.
I’m not surprised at the countries going this year. Obviously the components of the UK and Ireland were going to be well represented along with other parts — particularly the northern — of Europe. There’s always lots of Americans at Worldcon, US and Canadian fen like visiting Britain as tourists, and with the next Worldcon and a bid set un the US there, it would increase it. Plus Glasgow and the armadillo have form for throwing a good con. Once more with ceiling!
This all reminds me I need to buy a Seattle membership. And get started reading this year’s stuff.
Plus it’s more like $23K US spent.
Er, the money on the fake members, sorry, editing on a tablet is hard. Anyway that’s as of yesterday’s exchange rate for GBP to USD.
A lot of money in anybody’s currency.
I could think of better things to do with so much money than try to manipulate the Hugos. Even if you want to invest the money in SFF, there are so many better things to do than trying to buy yourself a Hugo and then be too stupid to pull it off. Nice windfall for Glasgow and the WSFS, though.
It looked to me like they refunded the money for those memberships, from their announcement. Per the File 770 report, “we received a confidential report that at least one person had sponsored the purchase of WSFS memberships by large numbers of individuals, who were refunded the cost of membership after confirming that they had voted as the sponsor wished.”
I would have been happy for Glasgow to have the financial windfall, but refunding is the right thing to do, even if these folks are fraudsters.
I read that as “the scamming sponsor paid for (refunded) the membership after they confirmed that the vote was cast in the way the sponsor wanted”, not that Glasgow refunded the money. But it’s a little ambiguous.
The Hugo team handled this mess very well. And whoever is behind this, has not only wasted a lot of money, they’re also very stupid (thankfully). If I had to generate 377 names for fake members, I would do a much better job than this bunch has done. I also would vary the ballots a bit and have them vote for different finalists in other categories, so the ballots don’t stick out so much and look like a lot of people organically prefer finalist A. Thankfully, they were very stupid about it.
We’ll probably be able to tell who finalist A is, when the full voting and nominating data is released, and I feel sorry for them, since this was done without their knowledge. Though you can make some educated guesses if you look at the finalist announcement and the maximum and minimum number of nominations needed to get on the ballot, because one category has an unusual outlier.
The European Worldcons always attract a lot of European as well as Middle Eastern fans plus North-American fans who’ll combine Worldcon with a holiday. There’s usually a fair number of Asian and Australian fans as well. Though we seem to be having fewer Middle Eastern fans this year for political reasons and also fewer East European fans, also for political reasons. Helsinki, for example, has a lot of Russian, Belarussian, Polish, Ukrainien, Estonian, etc… members, because Helsinki was very conveniently accessible for them.
I actually bought an attending membership for Seattle before the price went up. It will be my first visit to Seattle (and first time west of the Rio Grande), though my Dad said Seattle was lovely, when he visited in the late 1990s.
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