A swathe of ballots for the 2024 Hugo Awards – set to take place August 11 at Glasgow Worldcon, Scotland – have been deemed fraudulent and disallowed. Of 3,813 ballots, 377 (9.89%) have been found to have been issued by non “natural persons” using fake names and more. All are believed to have been favouring a specific, undisclosed nominee.
In existence since 1953, the Hugo Awards are some of the highest plaudits on the science fiction calendar, with categories stretching from short stories, to novels, movies, TV, and comics. The final ballot voting period for the 2024 Hugo Awards took place between April 20 and July 20. It appears that as soon as voting closed, the administrative panel noticed oddities.
In a statement by Hugo Administrator Nicholas Whyte on July 22 (full text here), the con publicly disclosed what had occurred:
“In the course of tallying the votes on the final ballot for the 2024 Hugo Awards, the Glasgow 2024 Hugo Administration team detected some unusual data.”
Adding:
“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.
“Many of these votes favoured one finalist in particular, who we will call Finalist A. This pattern of data is startlingly and obviously different from the votes for any other finalist in 2024, and indeed for any finalist in any of the previous years where any member of the current Hugo Subcommittee has been involved with administering the Hugo final ballot.”
Voting in the Hugo Awards is only available to paid up members of the World Science Fiction Society. The awards follow a two-tier voting system – with members submitting nominees, and a final ballot to select the winners across all categories. The awards are administered by the organisers of that year’s World Science Fiction Convention, referred to as Worldcon. The cost of membership for this year’s Worldcon is £45 (~$58).
Whyte also said that the administrators were confidentially informed that at least one person had been sponsoring voters to favour a preferred candidate(s). If true, someone spent at least £16,965 (~$22,000) to skew the vote. Since there is no clear evidence that the candidate was knowingly involved in the scheme they have been kept anonymous and remain in the process.
Whyte:
“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. We are therefore not identifying them. Finalist A has not been disqualified from the 2024 Hugo Awards. However, they do not win in their category, once the invalid votes have been disallowed.”
The Hugo Awards have encountered scandals with surprising frequency in recent years. Last year in particular it was unearthed that a number of candidates were removed from the final ballot due to political sensitivities (Worldcon 2023 took place in Chengdu, China). It is believed that the immediate declaration of the irregularities from this year’s vote was an act of transparency on the part of the organisers.
From the conclusion to Whyte’s statement:
“We believe that it is important for transparency that we inform you now about what has happened. 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.”
