No Excuses - Get Out and Vote

[kevin_standlee]

Voting in the 2008 Locus Poll & Survey is free and is open until April 15. You don't need to be a subscriber to Locus. You don't need to be a member of any convention. You don't have to pay any money at all. You don't even have to pick from among the works on the drop-down boxes. You can vote for any work published last year.

I have taken to asking most people who complain about how unfair it is that they have to pay absurdly large amounts of money to vote on the Hugo Awards whether or not they have voted on the Locus Awards. Most of them have not. They should do so. The Locus Awards may not be the Hugos, but they have a decent amount of respect within the field.

Why yes, I just cast my ballot this afternoon. How did you guess that?

Comments

You did? Me Too!

[maurinestarkey.livejournal.com]

Yes I did. I wish I had read more this year. Read more of the titles that were up for vote.

Still feeling guilty...but I voted.
MO

some of us can't honestly vote

[jorhett.livejournal.com]

I can't feel right about voting when I've read just one or two of the entries. I'll probably fall down the same path with the Hugos (not voting) if I don't change my life enough to get some more reading done.

Re: some of us can't honestly vote

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Remember that the Locus poll doesn't have any entries. There's a lot of stuff in the drop-down boxes that comes from Locus Magazine's Recommended Reading list -- but they're not "nominees" in the same sense as the nominees on the Hugo Awards final ballot. I know that I entered a fair number of things that weren't in the drop-down boxes.

If you liked the books you read and think they are award-worthy, I say you should vote for them. I make no pretense of reading hundreds of books a year. Nobody is expected to have read the entire field or even a large portion of it in order to be "entitled" to vote. But the right to vote does obviously include the right to abstain, and if you honestly feel you shouldn't express any opinion, there's nothing wrong about that.

(I only get grumpy when people say that isn't not fair that they have to buy a WSFS membership to vote on the awards that WSFS presents; that's not at all the same thing as saying you don't feel qualified to vote.)