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The Hugo Award Voter's Guide

By Cheryl Morgan

Have you ever looked at the results of the Hugo Awards and said to yourself, “Why on Earth did that get a Hugo?” Well, here is your chance to do something about it. No, seriously, it is. A lot of people think that the Hugos are awarded by some secretive committee of judges, but that’s not true. The Hugos are voted upon by the members of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS). And as a member of Interaction, you (along with several thousand other people) are automatically a member of WSFS. You get to vote in the Hugos. Sadly, only about 20% of the members of any year’s Worldcon actually participate in the Hugo voting process. Once again, this is often due to myths and misunderstandings. The purpose of this article is to explain how to participate.

One of the things that puts people off is that Hugo voting is supposed to be “too difficult”. Certainly the ballot is quite long, but then there are 14 categories to consider. The Hugos do use a preferential ballot, but if you have ever participated in European Community elections, or an Australian general election, you will have a good idea of what is required. Let’s start at the beginning. The Hugos are voted on in two stages: nomination and final ballot. These two stages are quite different, and we need to look at them separately.

Nominations

The purpose of the nomination stage is to produce a short list of five finalists for the final ballot. Each voter gets to pick five choices (nominations) in each category. Each choice has equal weight (and you can’t nominate a work or person twice in the same category). The five works or people with the most nominations get to go on the final ballot. How hard can that be?

Well, the usual excuse I hear is that you should not participate in the nominating stage unless you have studied the field. This is nonsense. Even professional SF critics like John Clute and Gary K. Wolfe can’t read anywhere near all of the works published in an individual year. The whole point of the nominating process is to whittle down the vast amount of SF published each year into a short list that everyone can look at. So don’t worry, nominate things that you have read that you like. If you haven’t seen anything you like in a given category, or you can’t think of five choices, don’t worry, you don’t have to fill in every space on the ballot.

HUGO PIN Your Hugo Personal Identification Number (PIN) is an important piece of information, as you will need it, as well as your name and membership number, to vote online. You will find your PIN at the bottom right of the label on the Progress Reports that we post to you. If you have mislaid your envelope, you can request your PIN by email by contacting the Hugo Administrator.

Some people will also tell you that you can’t vote in the Hugos if you are a fantasy fan because the Hugos are only for science fiction. This is also nonsense. The WSFS Constitution very clearly says that the Hugos are for science fiction and fantasy. Three of the last four Best Novel winners have been fantasy.

The other common excuse for not nominating is that people say they don’t know what works are eligible, or what category they are eligible for. What is the difference between a novella and a novelette? What is the dividing line between long form and short form dramatic presentations? This can be a bit hard, but there are lots of places where you can get help. Magazines such as Locus published their Best of 2004 lists early in 2005. There are also a number of “Hugo Recommendation Lists” published on the Internet in which members of clubs or readers of a magazine say what they are voting for.

Timeline

The Hugo nominating ballot was published in Progress Report 3. The nomination deadline was 11 March 2005, so this part of the process is now complete. Interaction announced the results of the nominating ballot on 26 March 2005 - you can read the press release here.

The final ballot will be published with Progress Report 4, which will arriving with members in late April 2005, and once again will be available online. The deadline for submission of final ballots is 8 July, 2005. The results will be announced at the Hugo Awards Ceremony at Interaction on the evening of Sunday, 7 August 2005. If you’re already familiar with the Hugo Awards, note that the deadlines this year are slightly earlier than you may expect, because Interaction is four weeks earlier than most recent Worldcons.

Final Ballot

The final ballot for the Hugos uses a preferential voting system. Instead of choosing five, equally-ranked items in each category, you get to rank the five nominees in order of preference. Put a 1 against your first choice, 2 against the second, and so on. Easy, isn’t it. The hard bit is understanding how the votes are counted. It goes like this.

To begin with, all of the first preference votes are counted, just like a traditional “first past the post” ballot. But then the nominee with the least number of first preference votes gets eliminated. The second preference votes for that nominee are then totaled, and added to the first preference votes of the remaining nominees. If there is no second preference, then the ballot in question is discarded. This gives us new vote totals for the remaining nominees, and the nominee with the least total votes is discarded. Once again second preferences are examined or, if the second preference has been eliminated, you go on to the third preference and so on. Eventually we will be down to just two nominees, and the one with the highest final vote total wins. The whole process then starts again from the beginning, but eliminating the winner, so that we can see who came second. And so on. (Thankfully this process is automated: the same piece of software has been used in Hugo voting for years.)

The importance of this process is that you can rarely win a Hugo just on first preference votes. If you examine the voting patterns you will quite often see that a particular nominee gets a lot of first place votes, but drops down the order as preferences are redistributed. The system works against nominees with a small base of very enthusiastic fans and in favor of nominees with a broad base of support. So lower preferences do matter, and you should think carefully about how you use them.

No Award

The final ballot will give you an additional choice in each category. As well as the five nominees you can also vote for “No Award”. You treat it just like any other nominee. You can vote it first, in some other position, or not ranked at all. What this does is give you the opportunity to indicate that some or all of the nominees are not worthy of a Hugo and that you would rather see no award made than have it go to one of the nominees you placed after No Award. (Note that you do not need to nominate No Award – it will appear on the ballot automatically.)

There have been occasions in the past when No Award has won a category, most recently in 1977 when it finished top in Best Dramatic Presentation. More recently the occasional nominee will finish below No Award. This generally happens when a nominee has enough devoted supporters to make the final ballot but is thoroughly disliked by most other voters.

Best Web Site

Interaction has chosen to exercise its right under the WSFS Constitution to award one extra Hugo in addition to the traditional categories. This will be Best Web Site. The category has been tried once before, at ConJosé in 2002, when it was won by Locus Online. Any web site is eligible, regardless of whether it carries fiction, news, criticism, art, online games or anything else, although of course it should have something to do with science fiction or fantasy.

Eligibility Extension

When you get to look at the nomination recommendation lists you may do a double take because there are works on there that were published years ago. Don’t worry, it is probably OK. WSFS has always had a policy of extending Hugo eligibility to works that are hard to get hold of. Recently it has been noticed that, because most Hugo voters are American, works only published outside America are at a significant disadvantage. WSFS has therefore taken to granting a blanket eligibility extension for works first published elsewhere some time ago but receiving their first US publication in the current eligibility year. Because of a recent upsurge of interest in British SF on the far side of the Atlantic, one or two well-known works are newly eligible under this rule. There are also three specific works whose eligibility was extended to this year’s Hugos. These extensions are listed in the instructions on the nominating ballot.

Join in the Fun

Hopefully you can now see that participating in the Hugos is very easy. At Interaction we hope to see a large percentage of our members participating. You have a right to vote: use it. And don’t forget to come along to the Hugo Award Ceremony. Many people take the opportunity to dress up to celebrate science fiction’s gala night. It is very much like the Oscars, except that to our knowledge no Hugo winner has ever thanked their personal trainer.

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Page last updated 31^st March 2005