First Deadline Doom Approaches

[kevin_standlee]

If you were not a member of Anticipation (2009 Montreal Worldcon), you have until the end of January to join Aussiecon 4 (2010 Melbourne Worldcon) to be eligible to nominate for the 2010 Hugo Awards. The nominations period is open until March 13, but you have to have your A4 membership in now in order to nominate. I do not know how A4 plans on defining "end of January." If they're counting it as one minute after 23:59 on 31 January in Melbourne, that's just before 5 AM Pacific Time (8 AM Eastern Time) tomorrow morning in the USA. In other words, if you plan on buying that A4 supporting membership in time to nominate, you're better off doing it today, Saturday, January 30 as I write this.

Meanwhile, Cheryl has written an article on the Feminist SF blog about Hugo voting that, among other things, takes a shot at a common fallacy that causes people who are otherwise qualified to nominate to disqualify themselves. This fallacy amounts to, "I'm not qualified to nominate because I haven't read/seen everything that was published/shown last year, so I can't possibly know if what I liked was the best there was."

My reply to anyone who claims that they haven't read everything published last year is a very big, So What? Nobody can read or watch everything. Nobody should be expected to do so. Nominate the things you enjoyed and that you think would be worthy of an award. Don't worry if you somehow missed some worthy work. If others read/saw it and liked it, they'll nominate it. The process is stronger the more members of Worldcon participate, and you weaken if if you are eligible to nominate and self-disqualify yourself for specious reasons.

Besides, you can bet that there are other members who don't have such (unnecessary) scruples, and they are nominating. So if you want to counteract them, you have a responsibility to cast your own nominating ballot.

And please don't worry if you can't fill in every space in every category. For example, you might not have read any short fiction last year. That's okay. Leave categories blank if you have no ideas. I don't think I'm telling tales out of school to reveal that, in my past years of being a Hugo Award Administrator, the ballot that filled in every space in every category was the exception, not the rule.

While I'm one of those people who thinks that we make people pay too much to get their WSFS voting rights, and that WSFS only accidentally did so by the way we tied voting and initial attending membership rates together, the first step toward increasing voter turnout is to get the thousands of people who are already eligible to nominate to do so. Do your duty, folks!

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'm telling tales out of school to reveal that, in my past years of being a Hugo Award Administrator, the ballot that filled in every space in every category was the exception, not the rule.

If I remember correctly, I believe my first year as administrator there were four of them.

[mwillmoth.livejournal.com]

Why is there a deadline of Jan 31 to obtain a membership in order to nominate when the deadline to nominate is March 13?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Because the WSFS Business Meeting passed a rule in 1990-91 (first affecting the 1992 Hugo Awards) requiring it. It appears to have been a reaction to an incident with the 1989 Hugo Awards where a number of Hugo Award nominating ballots all very similarly marked, all from the same place, and paid for with sequentially-numbered money orders arrived right at the voting deadline. The idea was that setting the membership deadline before the voting deadline would cut down on what was perceived to be vote fraud.

The end-of-January deadline is hard-coded into the WSFS Constitution. (In fact, as originally passed in 1990, it would have been a month earlier, but a last-moment amendment at ratification in 1991 moved it to the current date.) The deadline for nominating is "soft" in that it's set by the administering Worldcon, not by WSFS rules.