Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards Statement – 22 July, 2024

Cost analysis:

The administrators identified 377 ballots and associated memberships as fraudulent. Assuming all fraudulent memberships were new, the minimum cost per voting membership is £45 [1]. Total cost assuming no additional undetected memberships: £16,965 or just under $22,000 at current exchange rates.

Unfortunately current discussions of the marketing value of a Hugo Award have been somewhat drowned out by those who think the fan value of a Hugo is not as high as it once was, but it's not an influential award; if it's true that a Hugo Award for Best Novel generates a thousand or so additional sales, it's hard to make the economics of buying a Hugo make sense.

[1] https://glasgow2024.org/for-members/memberships-and-tickets/, WSFS Membership.

This was discovered due to the bad actor being incompetent.

Clearly by spending a bit more, or putting in more of an effort using plausible names for every alleged bot vote it could not be detected.

Gathering a list of 400 real names is trivial.

> Most of all, we want to assure the winners of this year’s Hugos that they have won fair and square, without any arbitrary or unexplained exclusion of votes or nominees and without any possibility that their award had been gained through fraudulent means.

It is of course completely impossible that while one person was arranging fake votes using obviously fake names, they or someone else might have arranged fake votes using more realistically fake names.

Like, I agree that there's not a lot that the committee can do here, but the Hugo voting process in its current form does not warrant this level of confidence. We simply cannot be sure whether the people who "won" did so fairly or not.

Given how the names were generated, it seems the bad actor might actually want to be caught. Maybe it was trying to get the committee to disqualify a title. Since it doesn't make sense financially, as a sibling comments points out, so personal grudge might be the motivation. But I guess we'll never know.

Hugo and Nebula awards drive my fun-reading list. It is sad to hear that even this quaint corner of the book world is no longer ignored by vote and review manipulators. Is nothing holy anymore!? man shakes a fist at the space-ship shaped cloud

Might be worth dropping some coin on getting the SFWA Lawyers to contract an outside data analysis group to verify these findings after the absolute fustercluck that was the Hugos 2023. I think this statement is made in good faith, and I believe they believe they are correct in their analysis but the shadow of the 2023 Hugos is long and dark. There will be questions regardless of how many good faith statements the committee makes. I don't envy them having to deal with this.

I imagine that working for organizations like this is a thankless job.

A good argument for restricting voting to actual attendees.

Keep in mind that you have be to registered and pay a fee to vote, but from the sound of this they don't verify names.

The total tally here is of less than 4,000 votes. It's not surprising that people game this, the economic gains of having a book listed as a Hugo award winner must be huge.

Ahh, the consistent, mind-boggling, teen-gamergate-troll immaturity of the Hugo Awards.

Is there so much money to be made from winning a Hugo award or are bot farms so cheap?

My theory is that this is the first year that the AIs have tried to stuff the ballot for their favourite author, they're just not very good at it yet (and that Finalist A is likely Martha Wells)

I was thinking the phrase "natural persons" was something sci-fi related, but its just the counter point to the concept of "legal persons"

This messy situation demands a lot of trust of the organisers—trust they do not have, after they corruptly tampered with the 2023 votes and tried to cover that up.

L Ron Hubbard will have to wait another year.

"Transparency".

No mention of who "Finalist A" is.

Not very transparent, really.

i didn't have "Hugo Awards have another ballot controversy" on my 2024 events bingo-card

Coming on the heels of the 2023 Hugo Awards disaster (certain authors excluded for fear of offending China, see https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censors...) it's hard to believe the supposed post-Chengdu reforms didn't take into account loopholes like this.

The only type of voting that is secure is in person, secret ballot, after presenting id.

> We have no evidence that Finalist A was at all aware of the fraudulent votes being cast for them, let alone in any way responsible for the operation.

X doubt. Name names.