Someone tried to buy a Hugo Award by buying a bunch of Glasgow Worldcon memberships and having them vote. Fortunately, the attempt was brain-dead stupid and the Hugo administration team caught it. Details are on File 770.

The stupidity consisted of using obviously fake names for the fake members. “These included, for instance, a run of voters whose second names were identical except that the first letter was changed, in alphabetical order; and a run of voters whose names were translations of consecutive numbers.” 377 votes out of 3,813 were disqualified. The nominee that was being pushed did not win, and the Glasgow committee says there’s no reason to believe that the nominee was responsible for the campaign.

Because the voting is confidential, the Hugo team isn’t going to say what nominee the fake ballots boosted; there has been speculation, but I’ll leave that for others. Some categories are unlikely; I can’t imagine anyone throwing four-digit amounts of money at getting a “best fanzine” or “best fan artist” award. Beyond that, who knows?

The people running the Hugos seem to have handled this properly, and hopefully they didn’t miss any other blocs of fake votes. Even so, this is going to add to the turmoil around the Hugos that started with the unexplained disqualifications in 2023.