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The Hugo Awards Disqualified Hundreds of Votes for One Finalist as Fraudulent

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Another year, another Hugo Awards controversy. It’s been ten years since the awards first had to deal with the “sad puppies” (and then “rabid puppies”) campaign, which involved backlash against increased nominations for women authors and authors of color on the ballot. Trying to solve this problem has plagued the awards since. Then, in 2023, the awards were held in China, and it came out that several works — including some of the biggest SFF books of the year, like Babel by R.F. Kuang — had been deemed ineligible for political reasons, in an effort not to offend the Chinese government. This was covered up for months, until emails leaked that showed the whole censorious story.

Now, the 2024 awards have their own controversy. The Hugo administration subcommittee has issued a statement saying that they have disqualified hundreds of votes for one finalist — representing 377 of the 3,813 total votes — for being fraudulent. The subcommittee says the votes included “obvious fake names” as well as a series of voters who had the same name except for changing one letter.

Voters must be paid members of the World Science Fiction Society, meaning that these fraudulent votes represent tens of thousands of dollars in memberships. The subcommittee claims many memberships were sponsored by one person, who refunded the cost after confirming the member had voted as the sponsor asked.

The finalist who received most of these votes has not been disqualified. The subcommittee says they have no evidence this writer was aware of the campaign. They did not win in their category after the fraudulent votes were disqualified, however.

The Hugo Awards are well aware of skepticism after last year. In their statement, they said, “We recognise that after the Hugo voting in 2023, many in the community will, understandably, have questions about this…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 read the full statement at the Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards website.

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.

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