{"id":15352,"date":"2016-08-22T15:05:10","date_gmt":"2016-08-22T22:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2016\/08\/22\/15352.html"},"modified":"2016-08-22T15:05:10","modified_gmt":"2016-08-22T22:05:10","slug":"who-gets-to-pick-whats-on-the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2016\/08\/22\/who-gets-to-pick-whats-on-the\/","title":{"rendered":"Who gets to pick what’s on the Hugo ballot?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I just posted this as a comment on Scalzi's blog entry about the Hugos<\/a>, and figured I ought to post it here (lightly edited) as well. I know I've said all this before, but I think it's worth repeating.<\/p>\n

In various contexts, I feel like I'm seeing people say “Well, there was a bunch of good stuff on the ballot this year, so Beale(\/Vox Day) has already lost; and he had no serious negative effects this year, so all is well and we can ignore him.”<\/p>\n

It's true that the ballot (except for a couple of categories) had a bunch of worthy stuff on it this year. But I think it's really important to note that, regardless of whether we liked what was on it, the ballot was largely determined by Beale.<\/p>\n

Which is to say, there were plenty of other worthy works and people that didn't<\/em> make it to the ballot because Beale didn't happen to put them on his slate. (Graphic Story is a great example of that—the stuff that got pushed off by the slate is excellent<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Nearly 80% of the items that Beale put on his slate ended up on the final ballot<\/a>. In most categories, his slate determined at least three and usually four or all five of the items in the category.<\/p>\n

That's partly, as Scalzi noted, due to Beale having populated some categories of his slate with already-popular work; there are plenty of slated items that I'm certain would have been on the ballot regardless. And in a few categories, three or four non-slate works or people made it through, which is great.<\/p>\n

But overall, Beale essentially got to decide what works and people the voters would be choosing among.<\/p>\n

And that seems to me to be fundamentally harmful to the integrity and value of the Hugos. Even if every item he slated was something that I loved, I would still feel that he was tainting the award by using a slate to determine most of the contents of the ballot.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just posted this as a comment on Scalzi’s blog entry about the Hugos, and figured I ought to post…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-awards"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}