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Originally Posted by kennyc
Looks like the short-forms took it in the shorts. Too bad. This whole episode is to me a serious black mark on the award. Seems there should be some serious thought about revision to how the nominating and voting works.
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At the WSFS business meeting today, they passed two constitutional amendments to change the nominating process, which need to be ratified next year before they will take effect for works published in 2016. I think that if they are amended next year, ratification would be delayed a year, and if they are not ratified, the amendment is cancelled, and a new amendment would need to be proposed in 2017, ratified in 2018, and take effect in 2019.
The 4 of 6 amendment would change nominations so that each member can nominate 4 works, and each category would have 6 finalists. That would only make it slightly harder to do a slate, but it would be easy for a dedicated slate to have half the members vote for slate A and the other half vote for slate B and have the same effect the rabid puppies had this year.
The E Pluribus Hugo amendment changes the nominating so that for each category, the member gets one point that's split between all of their nominations. The elimination goes through a series of rounds where the nominee with the least number of points is eliminated (a tie eliminates the work with the least number of nominations), and when a member's nominee is eliminated, the member's point is then split between the remaining nominees. If you have a large number of members nominating by slate, and the rest of the members nominating randomly, the slate nominators choices will essentially be competing among themselves and only one choice will remain in competition with the other choices. I haven't tried to implement and test this personally, but I suspect that this might be susceptible to slate manipulation if you had separate subslates for each final nomination slot in the category. Still, you'd probably need 3-5 times the number of slate members than the rabid puppies had to be successful, and the rule to eliminate the nominee with the least number of nominators might not be in the slate nominee's favor.