Someone apparently spent $21,000 to very poorly rig the Hugo Awards

It’s been a difficult decade for the Hugo Awards, the coveted science-fiction/fantasy awards that emerge every year from the Worldcon convention. A decade of open attempts at ballot manipulation has put a national spotlight on Worldcon’s awards process, once mostly of interest to the relatively small number of fans who buy voting memberships. The latest scandal? An unnamed party secretly bought hundreds of fake memberships to the 2024 convention to pack the ballot box for a single nominee. From what the organizers have said publicly about the attempted fraud, it’s clear this was the most inept, clumsiest Hugo-rigging scheme to date — and also the priciest.

The Hugos have been in the news frequently since the “Sad Puppies” movement made international news in 2015. The group used pre-planned voting blocs to pack the ballot with their own members and chosen nominees — largely straight, white males, as a “corrective” against perceived diversity. The resulting news coverage blew up in the mainstream — not because of widespread obsessive interest in the mechanics behind the Hugos, but because of the way the Puppies represented a rising faction in an ongoing political war against women, queer-identified folks, and people of color in public spaces.

A second, related movement, the “Rabid Puppies” slate, followed the next year, and heightened the controversy. An angry response to George R.R. Martin’s awards-show hosting gig in 2020 got more air than it might have otherwise because of Martin’s Game of Thrones fame. And revelations that the 2023 nominees were heavily censored behind the scenes has brought to light a lot of lingering questions about the awards’ voting and vetting process.

Now the Hugos are dealing with this year’s surprising new problem: incredibly inept ballot-box stuffing. The Hugo Administration Subcommittee for Worldcon 2024, which will be held Aug. 8 to 12 in Glasgow, Scotland, has issued a statement detailing the “unusual data” (to put it mildly) that resulted in hundreds of votes being thrown out. According to the Subcommittee’s statement, the Hugos received “at least 377 votes” this year that were apparently arranged by someone who reimbursed several people for buying up multiple memberships under fake names.

The details are pretty hilarious. The ballot-box stuffers used “obvious fake names,” including “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.” (I’m just trying to imagine the committee looking at a list of voters with last names like, say, Buck, Chuck, Duck, and, um, Huck — or first names like Uno, Dos, Tres, and Quatro — and thinking “Who thought this would work?”)

According to the statement, 377 votes — all favoring “one finalist in particular” — were found fraudulent out of a total of 3,813 ballots. Those 377 votes were disqualified, but the finalist has not been publicly identified or removed from the ballot, since there’s no evidence they were involved in or aware of the vote-rigging. However, the statement notes, “they do not win in their category, once the invalid votes have been disallowed.”

The committee also noted that it received “a confidential report that at least one person had sponsored the purchase of World Science Fiction Society memberships by large numbers of individuals, who were refunded the cost of membership after confirming that they had voted as the sponsor wished.” Meaning that rather than purchasing hundreds of fake memberships themselves, someone farmed the task out to other people, who then botched the process.

But the most mind-boggling thing in all this is that to vote in the Hugos, you have to become a paid member of the WSFS. Voters can pay a higher fee if they want to attend Worldcon in person on a given year, or a lower one for remote voting rights in a given year’s Hugos. For the 2024 convention, membership costs £45 for remote members, or about $58 by current conversion rates. That suggests that someone out there paid more than $21,000 for those 377 fake memberships in an attempt to sway the vote — while putting the voting in the hands of people too lazy to come up with fake names that weren’t immediately, entirely obvious.

If only all election tampering was this ham-fisted, obvious, and comedic. The Hugo Administration Subcommittee made it clear in its statement that it wanted the details publicized for the purpose of transparency and to head off any concerns about this year’s voting being compromised. You can read its full statement here.