Last week's Hugo Awards point of crisis caused a firestorm even outside the SF community. I felt it time to record some additional thoughts above the summary of many proposals I did.

It's not about the politics

I think all sides have made an error by bringing the politics and personal faults of either side into the mix. Making it about the politics legitimises the underlying actions for some. As such, I want to remove that from the discussion as much as possible. That's why in the prior post I proposed an alternate history.

What are the goals of the award?

Awards are funny beasts. They are almost all given out by societies. The Motion Picture Academy does the Oscars, and the Worldcons do the Hugos. The Hugos, though, are overtly a "fan" award (unlike the Nebulas which are a writer's award, and the Oscars which are a Hollywood pro's award.) They represent the view of fans who go to the Worldcons, but they have always been eager for more fans to join that community. But the award does not belong to the public, it belongs to that community.

While the award is done with voting and ballots, I believe it is really a measurement, which is to say, a survey. We want to measure the aggregate opinion of the community on what the best of the year was. The opinions are, of course, subjective, but the aggregate opinion is an objective fact, if we could learn it.

In particular, I would venture we wish to know which works would get the most support among fans, if the fans had the time to fairly judge all serious contenders. Of course, not everybody reads everything, and not everybody votes, so we can't ever know that precisely, but if we did know it, it's what we would want to give the award to.

To get closer to that, we use a 2 step process, beginning with a nomination ballot. Survey the community, and try to come up with a good estimate of the best contenders based on fan opinion. This both honours the nominees but more importantly it now gives the members the chance to more fully evaluate them and make a fair comparison. To help, in a process I began 22 years ago, the members get access to electronic versions of almost all the nominees, and a few months in which to evaluate them.

Then the final ballot is run, and if things have gone well, we've identified what truly is the best loved work of the informed and well-read fans. Understand again, the choices of the fans are opinions, but the result of the process is our best estimate of a fact -- a fact about the opinions.

The process is designed to help obtain that winner, and there are several sub-goals

• The process should, of course, get as close to the truth as it can. In the end, the most people should feel it was the best choice.
• The process should be fair, and appear to be fair
• The process should be easy to participate in, administer and to understand
• The process should not encourage any member to not express their true opinion on their ballot. If they lie on their ballot, how can we know the true best aggregate of their opinions.
• As such, ballots should be generated independently, and there should be very little "strategy" to the system which encourages members to falsely represent their views to help one candidate over another.
• It should encourage participation, and the number of nominees has to be small enough that it's reasonable for people to fairly evaluate them all

A tall order, when we add a new element -- people willing to abuse the rules to alter the results away from the true opinion of the fans. In this case, we had this through collusion. Two related parties published "slates" -- the analog of political parties -- and their followers carried them out, voting for most or all of the slate instead of voting their own independent and true opinion.

This corrupts the system greatly because when everybody else nominates independently, their nominations are broadly distributed among a large number of potential candidates. A group that colludes and concentrates their choices will easily dominate, even if it's a small minority of the community. A survey of opinion becomes completely invalid if the respondents collude or don't express their true views. Done in this way, I would go so far as to describe it as cheating, even though it is done within the context of the rules.

Proposals that are robust against collusion

Collusion is actually fairly obvious if the group is of decent size. Their efforts stick out clearly in a sea of broadly distributed independent nominations. There are algorithms which make it less powerful. There are other algorithms that effectively promote ballot concentration even among independent nominators so that the collusion is less useful.

A wide variety have been discussed. Their broad approaches include:

• Systems that diminish the power of a nominating ballot as more of its choices are declared winners. Effectively, the more you get of what you asked for, the less likely you will get more of it. This mostly prevents a sweep of all nominations, and also increases diversity in the final result, even the true diversity of the independent nominators.
• Systems which attempt to "maximize happiness," which is to say try to make the most people pleased with the ballot by adding up for each person the fraction of their choices that won and maximizing that. This requires that nominators not all nominate 5 items, and makes a ballot with just one nomination quite strong. Similar systems allow putting weight on nominations to make some stronger than others.
• Public voting, where people can see running tallies, and respond to collusion with their own counter-nominations.
• Reduction of the number of nominations for each member, to stop sweeps.

The proposals work to varying degrees, but they all significantly increase the "strategy" component for an individual voter. It becomes the norm that if you have just a little information about what the most common popular choices will be, that your wisest course to get the ballot you want will be to deliberately remove certain works from your ballot.

Some members would ignore this and nominate honestly. Many, however, would read articles about strategy, and either practice it or wonder if they were doing the right thing. In addition to debates about collusion, there would be debates on how strategy affected the ballot.

Certain variants of multi-candidate STV help against collusion and have less strategy, but most of the methods proposed have a lot.

In addition, all the systems permit at least one, and as many as 2 or 3 slate-choice nominees onto the final ballot. While members will probably know which ones those are, this is still not desired. First of all, these placements displace other works which would otherwise have made the ballot. You could increase the size of the final ballot, you need to know how many slate choices will be on it.

It should be clear, when others do not collude, slate collusion is very powerful. In many political systems, it is actually considered a great result if a party with 20% of the voters gains 20% of the "victories." Here, we have a situation with 2,000 nominators, and where just 100 colluding members can saturate some categories and get several entries into all of them, and with 10% (the likely amount in 2015) they can get a large fraction of them. As such it is not proportional representation at all.

Fighting human attackers with human defence

Consideration of the risks of confusion and strategy with all these systems, I have been led to the conclusion that the only solid response to organized attackers on the nomination system is a system of human judgement. Instead of hard and fast voting rules, the time has come, regrettably, to have people judge if the system is under attack, and give them the power to fix it.

This is hardly anything new, it's how almost all systems of governance work. It may be a hubris to suggest the award can get by without it. Like the good systems of governance this must be done with impartiality, transparency and accountability, but it must be done.

I see a few variants which could be used. Enforcement would most probably be done by the Hugo Committee, which is normally a special subcommittee of the group running the Worldcon. However, it need not be them, and could be a different subcommittee, or an elected body.

While some of the variants I describe below add complexity, it is not necessary to do them. One important thing about the the rule of justice is that you don't have to get it exactly precise. You get it in broad strokes and you trust people. Sometimes it fails. Mostly it works, unless you bring in the wrong incentives.

As such, some of these proposals work by not changing almost anything about the "user experience" of the system. You can do this with people nominating and voting as they always did, and relying on human vigilance to deflect attacks. You can also use the humans for more than that.

A broad rule against collusion and other clear ethical violations

The rule could be as broad as to prohibit "any actions which clearly compromise the honesty and independence of ballots." There would be some clarifications, to indicate this does not forbid ordinary lobbying and promotion, but does prohibit collusion, vote buying, paying for memberships which vote as you instruct and similar actions. The examples would not draw hard lines, but give guidance.

Explicit rules about specific acts

The rule could be much more explicit, with less discretion, with specific unethical acts. It turns out that collusion can be detected by the appearance of patterns in the ballots which are extremely unlikely to occur in a proper independent sample. You don't even need to know who was involved or prove that anybody agreed to any particular conspiracy.

The big challenge with explicit rules (which take 2 years to change) is that clever human attackers can find holes, and exploit them, and you can't fix it then, or in the next year.

Delegation of nominating power or judicial power to a sub group elected by the members

Judicial power to fix problems with a ballot could fall to a committee chosen by members. This group would be chosen by a well established voting system, similar to those discussed for the nomination. Here, proportional representation makes sense, so if a group is 10% of the members it should have 10% of this committee. It won't do it much good, though, if the others all oppose them. Unlike books, the delegates would be human beings, able to learn and reason. With 2,000 members, and 50 members per delegate, there would be 40 on the judicial committee, and it could probably be trusted to act fairly with that many people. In addition, action could require some sort of supermajority. If a 2/3 supermajority were needed, attackers would need to be 1/3 of all members.

This council could perhaps be given only the power to add nominations -- beyond the normal fixed count -- and not to remove them. Thus if there are inappropriate nominations, they could only express their opinion on that, and leave it to the voters what to do with those candidates, including not reading them and not ranking them.

Instead of judicial power, it might be simpler to appoint pure nominating power to delegates. Collusion is useless here because in effect all members are now colluding about their different interests, but in an honest way. Unlike pure direct democracy, the delegates, not unlike an award jury, would be expected to listen to members (and even look at nominating ballots done by them) but charged with coming up with the best consensus on the goal stated above. Such jurors would not simply vote their preferences. They would swear to attempt to examine as many works as possible in their efforts. They would suggest works to others and expect them to be likely to look at them. They would expect to be heavily lobbied and promoted to, but as long as its pure speech (no bribes other than free books and perhaps some nice parties) they would be expected to not be fooled so easily by such efforts.

As above, a nominating body might also only start with a member nominating system and add candidates to it and express rulings about why. In many awards, the primary function of the award jury is not to bypass the membership ballot, but to add one or two works that were obscure and the members may have missed. This is not a bad function, so long as the "real ballot" (the one you feel a duty to evaluate) is not too large.

Transparency and accountability

There is one barrier to transparency, in that releasing preliminary results biases the electorate in the final ballot, which would remain a direct survey of members with no intermediaries -- though still the potential to look for attacks and corruption. There could also be auditors, who are barred from voting in the awards and are allowed to see all that goes on. Auditors might be people from the prior worldcon or some other different source, or fans chosen at random.

Finally, decisions could be appealed to the business meeting. This requires a business meeting after the Hugos. Attackers would probably always appeal any ruling against them. Appeals can't alter nominations, obviously, or restore candidates who were eliminated.

Comprehensive plan

All the above requires the two year ratification process and could not come into effect (mostly) until 2017. To deal with the current cheating and the promised cheating in 2016, the following are recommended.

1. Downplay the 2015 Hugo Award, perhaps with sufficient fans supporting this that all categories (including untainted ones) have no award given.
2. Conduct a parallel award under a new system, and fête it like the Hugos, though they would not use that name.
3. Pass new proposed rules including a special rule for 2016
4. If 2016's award is also compromised, do the same. However, at the 2016 business meeting, ratify a short-term amendment proposed in 2015 declaring the alternate awards to be the Hugo awards if run under the new rules, and discarding the uncounted results of the 2016 Hugos conducted under the old system. Another amendment would permit winners of the 2015 alternate award to say they are Hugo winners.
5. If the attackers gave up, and 2016's awards run normally, do not ratify the emergency plan, and instead ratify the new system that is robust against attack for use in 2017.