I don't know if there was any way Chengdu could have been prevented from winning, given the ballots sent in, without throwing out the rules....
If all of the likely-looking duplicates, it might have made a difference. Almost none of the ballots had addresses on them. Long runs of them all had the same email address. I don't mean a couple (like my wife using my email address because she doesn't use email), I mean dozens. Now so many ballots were rushed in at the last minute that they might still have won. But I think there were shenanigans. And the precedent appears to me to say that if you have $300,000 going spare, you just can "vote the phone book" and use the same address for every single voter, and the administering convention should just shut up and take your money. And if someone says, "Oh, but it it's in English and I know where the addresses are, I could see that it was obvious," then I suggest a form of racism there, in that it's okay for someone else to flood the election with votes that can't really be verified, but if I do it, then it's wrong.
No, I don't have $300K to throw at such a thing. I do sort of wish I could, just to prove the point.
I don't care about race. If someone could convince me that those 3000 voters were actually all individual natural persons spending their own money (not having it poured into their hands by whoever was bankrolling the bid), I'd say okay, fine, them's the breaks. But we now seem to have a situation that any entity that thinks that holding a Worldcon is a Good Think who has a quarter million dollars lying around from their tourism fund can simply purchase the election. Is that a good thing?
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Date: 2024-01-22 04:53 am (UTC)If all of the likely-looking duplicates, it might have made a difference. Almost none of the ballots had addresses on them. Long runs of them all had the same email address. I don't mean a couple (like my wife using my email address because she doesn't use email), I mean dozens. Now so many ballots were rushed in at the last minute that they might still have won. But I think there were shenanigans. And the precedent appears to me to say that if you have $300,000 going spare, you just can "vote the phone book" and use the same address for every single voter, and the administering convention should just shut up and take your money. And if someone says, "Oh, but it it's in English and I know where the addresses are, I could see that it was obvious," then I suggest a form of racism there, in that it's okay for someone else to flood the election with votes that can't really be verified, but if I do it, then it's wrong.
No, I don't have $300K to throw at such a thing. I do sort of wish I could, just to prove the point.
I don't care about race. If someone could convince me that those 3000 voters were actually all individual natural persons spending their own money (not having it poured into their hands by whoever was bankrolling the bid), I'd say okay, fine, them's the breaks. But we now seem to have a situation that any entity that thinks that holding a Worldcon is a Good Think who has a quarter million dollars lying around from their tourism fund can simply purchase the election. Is that a good thing?