I see that there's a new comment on Cheryl's blog that claims that it should have been mathematically impossible for the 5% to have applied in 1994. But the commenter has misread Cheryl's descriptions. The universe of 16 stories she described is the total number of finalists in all three short fiction categories taken together, not, as the commenter understood it to mean, the total number of stories nominated by anybody in the Short Story category.
In fact, the total number of stories nominated, including those that didn't make the ballot at all, was very large, as it is today. So I hope somebody will correct this commenter's error.
The commenter is right about one thing, though, which is that many, maybe even most, nominators don't fill in all the blanks. I wish that fact could be widely spread; it might encourage more people to nominate if they knew it was not just legal, but perfectly OK, to leave some or even most of the ballot blank. When I was a neo I felt I was letting the side down whenever I left a blank in my Hugo nomination ballot. But that was silly. One of the years I counted, I remember noting that there were only four ballots in the entire set that filled in all the blanks in every category. And, if I recall correctly, they were all by people from a certain club extremely active in promulgating Hugo recommendations.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2013-04-03 03:34 pm (UTC)In fact, the total number of stories nominated, including those that didn't make the ballot at all, was very large, as it is today. So I hope somebody will correct this commenter's error.
The commenter is right about one thing, though, which is that many, maybe even most, nominators don't fill in all the blanks. I wish that fact could be widely spread; it might encourage more people to nominate if they knew it was not just legal, but perfectly OK, to leave some or even most of the ballot blank. When I was a neo I felt I was letting the side down whenever I left a blank in my Hugo nomination ballot. But that was silly. One of the years I counted, I remember noting that there were only four ballots in the entire set that filled in all the blanks in every category. And, if I recall correctly, they were all by people from a certain club extremely active in promulgating Hugo recommendations.