The Hugo Awards has disqualified nearly ten percent of the votes cast this year because they were clearly faked.
According to a statement issued yesterday by Nicholas Whyte, Glasgow 2024 Hugo Administrator and Division Head of the World Science Fiction Society, at least 377 votes were cast fraudulently. For example, in some cases, the last names were all identical except for a change to the first letter, in alphabetical order. Other voters had names that were translations of consecutive numbers.
“In addition to patterns observable in the data, 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,” Whyte stated.
Only members of the World Science Fiction Society are allowed to vote on the Hugo Awards, and with a price of £45 (US $58), that adds up to a total of nearly $22,000 spent on membership fees for the fraudulent votes.
Whyte did not disclose the name of the author on whose behalf the fraudulent votes were cast but said that they were not automatically disqualified from the Hugo Awards because there was no evidence that they were aware of the fraud. However, once the invalid votes were disallowed, this author did not win in their category.
“This decision is not one made lightly, but we are duty bound as the Hugo Administrators to protect the Hugo Awards and to act against fraud,” Whyte stated.
There were also voting irregularities last year at the Hugo Awards, which were awarded in China, and were marked by significant controversy and lack of transparency.
“We recognise that after the Hugo voting in 2023, many in the community will, understandably, have questions about this,” Whyte stated. “Unfortunately, our ability to answer is very limited, due to our responsibility to maintain the confidentiality of the ballot and data protection regulations. There are proposals to institute a system of independent audit for Hugo votes. 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.”
However, the full voting results, nominating statistics, and voting statistics will be published immediately after the Hugo Awards ceremony in Glasgow this coming August, he said.
“Those will not include the 377 votes which have been disallowed but will include the other 3,436 votes,” he added. “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.”
You can watch Whyte’s announcement in the video below:
MetaStellar editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist, writing stories set in a future virtual world. And, during the day, she is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@metastellar.com. She is also the editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business, one of the top global sites covering virtual reality.