The recent 2023 Hugo Awards have been plagued with irregularities. Most notably, several authors including R. F. Kuang, Xiran Jay Zhao, and Paul Weimer were told that their works (Babel, Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor, various) were ineligible with no stated reason given, there were unusually sharp dropoffs in nomination counts by rank, and worst of all, there appear to be severe anomalies in the voting data and/or how the voting data were processed.

Thus we ask: what reason best explains the observed events? Anyone may add answers, but I reserve the right to arbitrarily resolve any submitted answers that I deem in good faith to be spam, duplicated, nonfalsifiable, or pointlessly inflammatory.

I will resolve the market to the best-supported single reason for the irregularities when such a reason becomes public (ie, through self-admission or through damning investigatory work).

In the event that there are two major causes for the Hugo irregularities (ie, both PRC censorship causing arbitrary disqualifications and a procedural error causing the vote results weirdness) then both will resolve to 50%. In the event that at the end of the year, we still don't know why what happened, happened, then I will poll traders in this market as to what should be done for resolve, choosing between {resolve N/A; resolve to MKT; resolve 50% each to the two leading/subjectively-likeliest consensus possibilities}.

Major sources:

http://corabuhlert.com/2024/01/21/the-2023-hugo-nomination-statistics-have-finally-been-release-and-we-have-questions/

https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2024/01/22/hugo-stats-where-are-we-today/