Westercon Site Selection Unofficial Results: Nobody Won

These are unofficial Westercon 75 (2023) Site Selection results in summary. Results are not official until formally received by the Westercon 73 Business Meeting, which is scheduled for 11:30 Saturday morning in California 4 here at Loscon 47/Westercon 73.

As of the end of site selection voting (8 PM Pacific Time today, November 26, at Westercon 73), no bids filed to host Westercon 75. The full detailed results including all write-ins will be published after the election is official, but the short version is that None of the Above won. Consequently, the election goes to the Westercon 73 Business Meeting. Per section 3.16 of the Westercon Bylaws, the Business Meeting may award the Westercon to any bid by a 3/4 vote, or by a simple majority decide that it is unable to decide, which would refer the decision to the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, owners of the Westercon service mark.

Because the selection is being made by the Business Meeting, almost every site selection restriction rule is suspended, other than the site must be somewhere in North America west of 104° west longitude or Hawaii. Essentially, the Business Meeting can vote to award the convention to any committee of people, and those people don't even have to hold the convention where they say they plan to hold it; they just have to figure out where to hold the convention. For example, in 2011, the Business Meeting awarded the bid to the "Olive Country" bid of Kevin Roche and Andy Trembley, who figured out a Westercon in Sacramento, not at the restaurant in Williams that was their original hoax bid.

All members of Loscon are members of Westercon 73 and can attend the Business Meeting and vote. No voting fees apply. OTOH, I don't know what we're going to do if we overflow California 4, which is not a large room.

Should the meeting on Saturday adjourn or run out of time without making a selection, an additional Site Selection meeting will be held on Sunday morning at 11:30 AM, also in California 4, solely for the purpose of concluding the decision on site selection.

I am the chair of the Westercon Business Meeting. It is my intention, after we receive the official results, to propose that the meeting go into Committee of the Whole to discuss site selection, and with luck the COTW will produce a decision upon which the Business Meeting proper can agree. This is so we don't run into the parliamentary rocks onto which I nearly steered us in 2011. I did learn a few lessons back in 2011. Let's see if we can come to a decision more quickly than we did a decade ago.

Loscon/Westercon Day 1: Settling In

Perhaps I shouldn't have slept in until after 8 AM on this first morning of Westercon, especially inasmuch as our plan to have breakfast in the room using the coffee/hot water machine to make instant oatmeal and tea ran afoul of the machine producing hot water with black specks no matter how many times we ran clean water through it. We speculate that past users of the machine were using used coffee cups to run additional hot water, and thus it was "contaminated" with old coffee. Eventually I ran down to the Starbucks in the lobby and got myself coffee and a breakfast sandwich, while Lisa used some of the bread and lunchmeat left over from yesterday to make her breakfast.

( Opening the Fan Table )

At 1 PM, Lisa, I, lindadee, and representatives of Worldcons and bids for Worldcons went to the Future Westercons and Worldcons panel, where we each extolled the virtues of our various events. Then it was back to the table for the rest of the afternoon until it was time for the Loscon/Westercon Opening Ceremony at 5 PM.

( Gavel to Gavel Coverage )

I borrowed the Gavel of Westercon back from Scott after the Opening Ceremony for use as the presiding officer of the Westercon Business Meeting.

Then it was back to the Fan Tables for a short time, but I did manage to do something other than sell Westercon and otherwise engage in smoffing.

( A Wonder-ful Costume )

Lisa and I closed down our fan table for the evening and walked down to Carl's Jr. to get some burgers and bring them back to the hotel room and eat there. Besides safety reasons, we're not that interested with much of anything on the hotel restaurant's menu, and the dining options in the immediate vicinity of the hotel are limited.

After eating, I went back to Site Selection and relieved lindadee to allow her to go have dinner with Sally Wohrle. I held down Site Selection until it closed at 8 PM. There were no last-minute bids or indeed last-hour voters. This is not that surprising. With no actual bids on the ballot, very few people cast ballots at all.

When Linda came back from dinner shortly after I closed Site Selection, we went up to her room and counted the ballots. The unofficial results, which trigger a Business Meeting site selection, are in my previous entry.

Linda and I swapped hot-water machines. She isn't planning on making in-room coffee or tea, and her machine produces clean hot water, so that works out, and the machines are otherwise identical, so the hotel need not fret.

Lisa and I learned that, with the surface parking lot full, that the hotel had allowed people to self-park in the garage. She and I were able to move the minivan from the awful location in the surface lot to a significantly better location in the garage not far from the ballroom level exit. This will make it much easier to move stuff back to the van when we leave on Monday.

We sold some memberships in Westercon 74 today, and talked to lots of people about the convention, answering many questions. We have sign-up sheets for planned walking tours for which some people have signed up. It was a productive day.

Tomorrow will be full of diversions, starting with the Site Selection Business Meeting at 11:30 AM, and ending with Match Game SF at 6 PM, both of which are in California 4, and both of which are probably in rooms that are too small, but we'll manage as best we can. One thing that I won't get that I got last night was a lot of sleep.