This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.
There are several items of business relating to the conduct of Site Selection votes for future Worldcons on this year’s WSFS Business Meeting agenda. I have already dealt with four of them, E5 which would put extra people into the site selection counting process, D7 (page 23) which tidies up the wording of Sub-section 4.4.2, F1 (page 31) which further tidies up Sub-section 4.4.2, and F10 which requires bidding committees to agree on software solutions.
There are another four proposed constitutional amendments on this topic. The first of these is F14 (page 44), and it is co-signed by me and a bunch of other people who have been involved with Site Selection ballot design. Very simply, it abolishes the requirement for site selection voters to provide their postal addresses or other Personally Identifying Information when voting. This extra information gathering is unnecessary, possibly illegal in some jurisdictions, and in others may expose voters’ privacy. Please vote for it.
The next is F15 (pages 45-46), which proposes that only votes cast remotely at least 15 days in advance, or in person at the selecting convention, should be counted for site selection purposes. It would be a huge change to the process of site selection voting. This is ostensibly to prevent a recurrence of the events of the 2021 vote, which however the proposers say that they do not want to relitigate.
I think it’s not unreasonable to remind ourselves of what actually happened in 2021. The Chinese translation of the Site Selection ballot produced by DisCon III was not clearly worded in terms of what information was required for the ‘address’ field, and it was also not clear at the time that the Constitution required voters to actually fill it in for the votes to be valid. There was a flood of last-minute emailed ballots from China, for Chengdu. The Site Selection administrators reported that 1591 of the ballots received from China lacked a street address, but otherwise valid. This number was more than enough to make the difference between the Chengdu bid and its only competitor.
The losing side in the 2021 vote then took an emergency resolution to the Business Meeting (see the minutes of the meeting, pages 31-34) which requested that the Business Meeting rule that votes where the address and other fields were not filled in correctly should not be counted for Chengdu. In my view, this was a very bad abuse of process. The Business Meeting simply does not have jurisdiction over the conduct of Site Selection votes, let alone a vote that is still taking place. Under Subsection 1.6 of the Constitution, that’s clearly a matter reserved for the seated Worldcon. The resolution should have been ruled out of order by the Chair as ultra vires.
In any case, as a matter of equity, if the Chinese version of the form was not clear, that was not the fault of the voters, who should not have been penalised for filling in the ballot form officially supplied by the convention.
However, the last-minute resolution was accepted under the Chair’s discretion; the Chair, having ruled that the resolution was in order, then stepped down from the chair and spoke in favor of it from the floor of the meeting. That seems highly irregular to me. No effort was made to inform the representatives of the Chengdu bid that the Business Meeting was about to try and invalidate most of their votes, on foot of a proposal from their main opposition. That also seems highly irregular to me.
The resolution was passed by 47 votes to 30, but I am glad to say that the WorldCon chair ignored it, rightly ruling that the bid that had got the most votes, ie Chengdu, should be declared the winner. This affair was not a high point of the Business Meeting’s conduct. Weasel words that the vote was purely advisory do not help; if the proposers had not intended it to have any effect, they would hardly have proposed it.
Several of those involved with this affair, including the then Chair of the Business Meeting and the 2021 Site Selection administrator, are proposers of F15. They now tell us that a number of ballots for the winning Chengdu bid “consisted of sequential blocks of ballots with what appeared to be consecutively assigned email addresses, that is, the “username” part of the email address before the “@”, or a subfield thereof, appeared to count up through sequential digits/letters.” It is implied that this information was made public at the time of the 2021 vote, but I have checked the record (minutes of the meeting, pages 63-65) and it was not; this is new information.
It is also implied that these alleged defects applied to all of the controversial votes. This is not the case; I scrutinized them myself as part of the process of integrating the 2022 Hugo nominating electors, and while some of the votes probably did fit this description, many certainly did not. (I did not analyze the data systematically at the time, and no longer have access to it.) The only defect alleged at the time was that the disputed votes lacked a street address.
I know as well as anyone that there have been attempts to cheat on Hugo voting in the past. I can see that the Site Selection process basically allows anyone with enough money to throw at the vote to win. The argument of F15 is that by shifting the deadline back two weeks, administrators will have the chance to toss out clearly fraudulent votes. But personally, I don’t think that someone who is determined to buy themselves a Worldcon is going to be deterred by an earlier deadline.
I think that F15 is fighting the wrong battle (and also, frankly, that the wrong people are proposing it). It would be better to start with an agreed concept of ballot fraud, which we do not have, and take the conversation about necessary steps forward from there. That may well involve adjustments to deadlines and procedures. The whole Site Selection process is anyway based on the needs of an earlier age and probably needs bigger reforms. But essentially this amendment is an effort to keep WorldCons as they have historically been, and to prevent new voices from getting into the system, and that is a recipe for stagnation and death.
In case it was not already clear, I will support any moves to kick this to a committee, and will vote against it if it comes to the plenary.
Finally for now, F20 (pages 50-53) revives a resolution that was kicked to a committee last year, which would restrict Worldcon locations to venues which are positively rated by various internationally published indices of good behaviour. The Committee appointed to examine this issue in 2024 failed to meet or produce a formal report, but its chair has summarized the ideas expressed by members in correspondence on pages 71 and 72 of the agenda. This is a very thoughtful piece of work, and I recommend reading it. In particular, the non-report asks:
Is it true that the Hugo Awards cannot be administered fairly in a country that exceeds an objective threshold of authoritarianism? Could the 2023 Hugo Awards have been properly administered by a different person?
Sites currently undergoing armed conflict still rank as acceptable according to the previously proposed indices. So does the US, which at least some members of the Worldcon community would not deem an acceptable bidding location at this time. Metrics are not real time, and any mechanism is subject to situational change between bid qualification and the time of the vote or convention.
These are good questions and good points. I’m very dubious anyway about hardwiring anything in the WSFS Constitution to external bodies, particularly at a moment when some of the best known human rights organisations are under attack and may not survive (though I really hope that they do). I would also very much regret formally restricting WorldCon to developed and mature democracies, which would be the effect of this change. I’ll be voting against.
Both of these last two resolutions are basically intended to ensure that WorldCon never goes to China again. I am not at all sure that China wants WorldCon again, given the reputational backfire from last time. If you want WorldCon to be restricted to a narrow group of countries, that’s your privilege; but don’t expect me to respect you for having that opinion.
2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22
