Hugo Award scandal reaches new low as Chinese voter disenfranchisement comes to light

What's worse than censorship? Mass disenfranchisement of voters

As bad as all those revelations were, another, even more dire scandal nearly slipped under the radar of many fans until writer Abigail Nussbaum called attention to it in another bit of excellent reporting on her blog.

When the Hugo Awards nomination data was first released, one of the many points of confusion people had was that there was an unusual "cliff" in the data between the first handful of contenders in each category and the rest of the pack. A blog post on Alpennia.com shows exactly what that cliff looked like, and why it was so unusual compared to any other year's Hugo stats, even those during the Sad/Rabid Puppies scandals. According to comments from Lacey which Nussbaum highlights in her report, the cliff was caused by even more disqualifications; this time of Chinese-language works which the Hugo team thought represented a "slate" being pushed by one particular publication.

Slates were at the heart of Rabid and Sad Puppy scandals; in essence, they're when a publication or interested party pushes a list of nominees out to their fans in order to inflate their chances of being on the ballot. And while the Puppies scandals showed what could happen when slate voting is pushed to its worst extreme, it isn't something that's actually against the rules of the Hugos in premise. I'm going to let Nussbaum's report speak for itself here, because it sums things up perfectly:

"The raw data spreadsheet Lacey leaked does not merely show that nominees like Babel and Paul Weimer were discarded for supposedly running afoul of PRC ideology. It also shows a large number of nominees, mostly Chinese-language, which do not appear anywhere on the final ballot or the nominations stats," Nussbaum writes. "When questioned about these nominees in the comments of File 770, Lacey—who, again, has been so apologetic about her treatment of Western nominees—replied simply that these nominations had been considered 'slate' nominations (many of them were included in recommendation lists published by SF World and other Chinese-language SFF magazines in preparation for the Hugos; on BlueSky, user Yilin has translated the text that accompanied these lists to make the point that they were not intended as a singular slate but merely a list of recommendations). It's the removal of these nominations, Lacey suggests, that has caused the "cliff" that many commentators observed in the final Hugo stats, in which there was a drop of hundreds of nominating ballots between the top 5-6 vote-getters and the ones below them."

"I'm going to say this again, because it is so shocking that it seems to have taken a lot of people some time to grasp the enormity of it: hundreds, perhaps even thousands of valid, legal nominating ballots were dropped from the final nominating stats, apparently under the pretext of having represented a slate, even though slates are perfectly legal under the Hugo rules. This was done on the orders of the Hugo administrator, with apparently no outside input or discussion, and appears to have elicited so little response from the Hugo team that they are casually mentioning it as if it's nothing. If these numbers are correct, it's entirely possible that the whole Hugo ballot should have looked completely different, and that none of the eventual winners in the fiction categories should have even been nominated."

So not only did the Hugo Administration team self-censor authors who they were concerned would offend the sensibilities of the PRC, they also potentially disenfranchised hundreds of ballots from Chinese fans voting for Chinese-language works. In light of all of this, it's hard to look at the 2023 Hugo Awards as anything other than a controversial and illegitimate mess.

Will the Hugo Awards ever recover from the Chengdu scandal?

We'll likely be sifting through the fallout of the Chengdu Hugo scandal for quite a while yet. Following Nussbaum's report, author Adrian Tchaikovsky, who won the Hugo Award in Chengdu for Best Series for his Children of Time books, has come forward and said he will no longer be citing his 2023 Hugo win on his works. Tchaikovsky writes on his website that the disenfranchisement of Chinese voters "means that the composition of the shortlists, as they were presented to be voted on, was entirely unreliable, with an unknown number of Chinese nominees denied their chance at contending."

"Based on this information, I cannot consider myself a Hugo winner and will not be citing the 2023 award result in my biographical details, or on this site.
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"The Hugo awards have the potential to be a respected pillar of the international fan community," Tchaikovsky continued. "I would be delighted to be considered, honestly and on my own merits, for such an award in the future. I look forward to systemic changes so that future awards can be administered with an eye to clarity, equity and accountability."

It's a shame on so many fronts that the Hugos have been tainted so thoroughly by how the administration team handled the awards in Chengdu. People were disqualified without reason, voters disenfranchised, and even the people who won are struck with doubt over the validity of their awards. The Hugo Award has been an important honor in the science fiction and fantasy fields for decades, and while it is no stranger to controversies, this latest is by far the worst in its long history. Where does it even go from here?

For now, it's encouraging that Glasgow Worldcon has been taking steps to reassure fans that measures will be taken to avoid a similar mishap this year. But without guardrails to avoid this kind of issue in the future, it's hard to imagine how the Hugo Awards will be able to win back trust. It isn't going to be a quick or easy road.

As Tchaikovsky said, "systemic changes" are going to be necessary to make sure this sort of thing never happens again. Here's hoping that those changes are forthcoming, and signal a better and more equitable future for the Hugo Awards.

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