Visualising the Hugos

Visualising the voting in the 2024 Hugo awards using Sankey graphs

How does this work?

Voting on Hugo and related award finalists is the fairly simple “Alternative Vote” system, also known as “Instant Runoff Voting” in the United States. In this system, voters simply rank their choices and the candidate with the least first-placed votes is eliminated, with those ballots going to the second-placed candidate. This can seem quite complicated, but it ensures winners have broad support and Sankey diagrams such as these should make it clear how it all works.

More critically, these graphs show the importance of voting for all the candidates you have a preference for: in several cases, the winner was not the person or work with the most first preferences. Nerds of a Feather and Saga 11 both won despite placing third in first preferences.

Nominations are run on the E Pluribus Hugo system, which is similar in principle (run multiple rounds and eliminate last place) but with changes to cope with the fact that nominations are unranked. In short, you get one point which is split amongst your nominations in a given category so if you have one nomination, it gets one point, two nominations would get half a point each and so on.

If you think all this is overly complicated and unnecessary - it’s not. The right-wing Sad Puppies campaign succeded in getting their nomination slates as finalists under the precursor nomination system but couldn’t win any actual awards under Alternative Vote.

More detail on the voting system is available from the Hugo Awards site, and original 2024 voting data is on the Glasgow 2024 web site.

FAQs

Why doesn’t X have a round 6?

Once a candidate has half the votes, counting stops: nobody else can win.

Why are some of the candidates off to one side in the nominations?

This is a bug, the system used to generate the graph positions can’t figure out how to position a node where there are no flows to or from it.

Why so few “No Transfers” for nominations?

We don’t have data for nomination rounds except the last 10, which (typically) represents the final 16 candidates. This means we don’t know the total number of no transfers, so this is a low number. Not displaying the transfers causes issues for the system used to generate the graphs. (The candidate eliminated in the first displayed round would have the wrong number of points)

Why isn’t the nomination with the least points always eliminated?

FAQs

Best Novel

Best Novella

Best Novelette

Best Short Story

Best Series

Best Graphic Story or Comic

Best Related Work

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

Best Game or Interactive Work

Best Editor Short Form

Best Editor Long Form

Best Professional Artist

Best Semiprozine

Best Fanzine

Best Fancast

Best Fan Writer

Best Fan Artist

Lodestar Award for Best YA Book

Astounding Award for Best New Writer