#note: I have purchased a supporting membership since 2017 (when they fixed voting post sad puppies) for every year excepting last year

[operafloozy]

As a note: The Hugo Awards Oversight team is different from year to year, and there's no oversight body to implement the awards. Nobody who was involved in last year's Hugo Awards will be involved in this year's.

Also, it's not that the Hugo Awards Admin Team chose to host the awards in China. The site was chosen by anyone who voted in the 2018 Hugo Awards - IE, anyone who purchased a membership to that years' Worldcon. Supporting memberships (where you don't attend the con but do get to vote) tend to be in the $50-$75 range, and you get the Hugo Awards packet, which includes most (if not all) of the six longlisted works in the nine writing categories - you get a lot for that voting right.

The main other contender that year was Winnipeg, which is fairly difficult to get to if you're not in North America. (Winnipeg's international direct flights are all either to the US, Mexico or the Caribbean, and most of those are seasonal - and it's not like there's another city better options that you can easily drive from). Bolstering China's bid was a fact that the Hugos are notoriously Anglophone-centric, China has a wildly popular science fiction scene, and I do think that some people were not sure if the worries were Sinophobia or serious. So voting for China was also seen as possibly voting for a more international and multilingual science fiction convention. The main arguments against it were less about tampering, and more about the ongoing Uighur genocide and whether or not it would be safe for hypothetical finalists to go to China, which was also countered by people saying that it wasn't safe for certain folks to go to the US either.

Even so, there was some ... weirdness about the selection voting, too. Mostly, there were a lot of ballots for China that mysteriously didn't have any addresses.

There's been a couple of good writeups about what happened and ideas on how to proceed (Scalzi, Bulhert, Felapton) but there's not an easy solution. Banning countries that we think might tamper with the results is hard to judge. It's horrible for those who were disqualified, but it's horrible for the winners, too - who lost out on the chance to win or lose fairly. It sucks for the people running it this year in Glasgow, and sucks for anyone who was hoping to win this year.

Guess who got disqualified from the Hugo Awards for unclear, most possibly political reasons!!

Award admin Dave McCarty's response to people asking why:

But this email is apparently just bouncing everything back so here's the full list of the admin team: