Re: SF-LIT Digest - 25 Aug 2015 to 27 Aug 2015 (#2015-73)

Barry Haworth <[email protected]> wrote:
 > As I undertand it, the puppies selected a bunch of works to promote,
 > and had enough numbers to get puppy nominations exclusively in some
 > categories.  Turns out this isn't hard - the number of people who
 > actually vote in the Hugos isn't too big (more on this later), and
 > since nominations are first past the post a couple of hundred people
 > voting for the same work is enough to get it in, past the unfocussed
 > voting of others voting for many, many other possible works.
 >
 > Which is a problem which needs to be fixed, definitely, but so far
 > though somewhat dubious it is nothing illegal - nothing that any other
 > organised campaign might not do. It is the reaction that rankles with
 > me.

We are already used to all that campaigning, but essentially an 
organised campaign converts money into votes, something we shouldn't be 
very happy about in a democracy. The saving grace is that campaigning 
mostly just activates voters who are already in your camp.

The SFW case is different. There the vote should be on books, not 
persons or a style category. Someone might be in the puppy camp, but 
they were telling him to vote for a list of books where he probably has 
read only one or two, if at all. So his vote is on persons, a sub-genre 
or an idea, but not the quality of the books in this list, at least not 
at the time of nomination.