I will report for TeleRead from Glasgow for Worldcon 2024 next month, but as many may know, the news has already started. A brazen attempt was made to suborn the voting process for the 2024 Hugo Awards, and the organizers both spotted and publicized the chicanery.
The Glasgow 2024 Hugo Administration Subcommittee promptly issued a full statement on the incident, and to my knowledge, this relates the full facts known to date. According to the statement, “A large number of votes in 2024 were cast by accounts which fail to meet the criteria of being ‘natural persons’, with obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics. These included, for instance, a run of voters whose second names were identical except that the first letter was changed, in alphabetical order; and a run of voters whose names were translations of consecutive numbers.”
The statement further explained that many of these false votes “favoured one finalist in particular, who we will call Finalist A.” Furthermore, “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.” The UK Guardian newspaper calculated the cost of the 377 memberships reportedly purchased in order to skew the votes, and came to a figure of at least £16,965 (US$22,000).
The incident raises few questions about the organization of the Glasgow Worldcon as it stands. The irregular pattern of voting was spotted promptly. The organizers then announced their findings just as promptly, in the interests of transparency. That looks like exemplary efficiency, and openness. Furthermore, the statement revealed that Finalist A showed no sign of knowing about the vote-rigging, and was not disqualified from the Awards—but still did not win in their category once the illicit votes had been disallowed.
“We believe that it is important for transparency that we inform you now about what has happened,” the statement reads. “We want to reassure 2024 Hugo voters that the ballots cast were counted fairly. 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.”
The incident does raise questions about the voting procedure for the Hugos, but that is outside the jurisdiction of the Glasgow organizers themselves. And the identity of Finalist A will almost certainly be a hot gossip item among the attendees at Worldcon 2024.
“There are proposals to institute a system of independent audit for Hugo votes,” the statement continues. “But at present such a system does not exist, therefore the raw 2024 voting data cannot and will not be shared outside the Glasgow 2024 Hugo team.”
The broader question, or consideration, for future Worldcons is how far the whole structure of the convention series needs to be revised in the light of its growing size and worldwide significance. There has been a long and jealously guarded tradition, dating back to the first Worldcon in 1939, that the World Science Fiction Convention, a.k.a. the annual convention of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS), “is organised by a different group of dedicated volunteers who participate in a bidding process that is open to any group that meets a small number of technical regulations,” as the wording on the Worldcon website states. The only permanent standing committee of the WSFS, alongside the ad hoc committees convened around the separate Worldcons and for other business, is the Mark Protection Committee (MPC), which controls and protects the WSFS’s brand names, trademarks, domain names, and other IP.
Does the whole Worldcon structure need more structures and more persistent oversight in future? Should there be more standing committees than just the Mark Protection Committee, to ensure continuity, and to support the volume and sheer turnover of a convention series that regularly counts at least “an average attendance of 4,000-5,000 fans”? The Glasgow Worldcon 2024 team undoubtedly exhibited exemplary professionalism in their handling of the votes issue – but those questions still have merit.
The convention will be held August 8-12.
