2015 Hugo Results
The controversial 2015 Hugo season reached its final end with the awarding of the awards tonight. It was an interesting (if predictable) result, and over the next few days I’ll be breaking down the stats.
The full winners list is here. Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem won the Best Novel award. I’m looking forward to breaking down those numbers; there’s a possibility of a swing vote in regard to this novel. We’ve never had a translated novel win before, and I don’t think we’ve ever had a novel win from the lowest nominated position.
For the other categories: No Award won in every category swept by the Puppies (Related Work, Short Form Editor, Long Form Editor, Short Story, and Novella). This indicates that the “No Awarders” were a strong majority of 2015 Hugo voters. We don’t know why they voted “No Award” (whether on principle or because they read and disliked the nominated works/editors), and we’re never likely to know that. I assume it was a mix, but it’d be interesting to know the exact ratio. Interestingly, No Award didn’t bleed over into a category like Best Novelette, where the only non-puppy pick was Heuvelt’s “The Day the World Turned Upside Down.” There had been some online chatter of not giving Heuvelt a Hugo “by default”; the stats should tell us whether or not this was a close race.
With the Heuvelt and Liu wins, and Helsinki winning the WorldCon bid for 2017, this is the first time there’s actually a “World” in WorldCon.
What Chaos Horizon will do now is wait for the data set to come out and begin breaking things down. Good night, and blog with you tomorrow!
Chaos Horizon 
Am I correct in understanding that ‘no award’ has a special rule that if at any point in the vote, no award has more than 25% of the votes, it wins?
If so all those categories doesn’t necessarily mean a vast majority of voters were no-award, just that there were enough
now, we’ll get the actual numbers shortly. but I did want to check my understanding of this rule.
That’s not my understanding. Here’s the 25% clause:
“No Award” shall be given whenever the total number of valid ballots cast for a specific category (excluding those cast for “No Award” in first place) is less than twenty-five percent (25%) of the total number of final Award ballots received.
It’s a protection against there not being enough valid ballots cast in a category, not a “No Award” wins if it gets 25% rule. You’d have to have a lot of blank ballots or 75% no ballots for it to kick in, and, in that case, you’d have a clear majority of No Awarders.
I also found this in the rules, so I guess I wasn’t remembering things correctly, but no award is still different from other votes.
It will be interesting to see the actual numbers.
The No Award Test
The final check before a winner can be determined is known as the No Award Test. The valid ballots are divided into three piles: those in which No Award is ranked higher than the prospective winner (PW), those in which the prospective winner is ranked higher than No Award, and those in which neither No Award nor the prospective winner have preferences listed. Note that a ballot that contains a preference for the prospective winner but does not contain a preference for No Award goes into the “prospective winner higher than no award” pile. This is because lack of preference is, by definition, lower than any preference. Having got the three piles, the votes in the “prospective winner higher than No Award pile” and the votes in the “No Award higher than prospective winner” pile are counted. If the number of votes with the prospective winner placed higher is greater then the result is confirmed. If the pile with No Award placed higher is greater then no award is given in the category that year.
It’s important that you realize that we count the ballot at this stage if the prospective winner is ranked OR No Award is ranked. You don’t have to rank them both. The only ballots that don’t count here are those that rank neither the PW nor NA. To put it another way:
If the PW ranks higher than No Award (or the PW is ranked and NA isn’t mentioned), count this as a YES vote for the PW.
If No Award ranks higher than the PW (or NA is ranked and the PW isn’t mentioned), count this as a NO vote against the PW.
If neither the PW nor No Award is listed, this is a blank ballot and doesn’t count at all.
Total the YES and NO votes. If YES wins, the PW is confirmed. If NO wins, then No Award wins.