Is my logic flawed?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Online voting for the 2020 Hugos has been promised "soon" for some time. It has not materialized. The deadline for the Hugo voting is 11:59 PM Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -7) on 15 July, 2020. I can't tell if online voting will ever be an option, therefore I should print out, fill out, and mail my paper ballot now, to ensure it arrives in time to be counted before the 2020 Worldcon.

I assume it's the date of the postmark they go by and not when it arrives but if I dither, and mail it June 14, it might show up after Worldcon and I can't see how it could be counted.

My logic is the worst case scenario of trusting online voting to show up is worse than the worst case scenario of mailing in my ballot. In the first case, I don't get to vote, but in the second I am out some stamps and a sheet of paper.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I'm still cheesed off at them for saying "site selection is important, submit your site selection vote soon, it is not actually possible to vote for site selection at this point in time" for several weeks. (And I am very cheesed off at WSFS in general for not adopting online voting for site selection by now.)

[melita66]

Really? I understand that site selection has more restrictions that would need to be verified, but...?

[voidampersand]

The Hugo voting deadline is always before the Worldcon, because for practical reasons, awards are made only for the winners, not for all the finalists. If your ballot shows up before the Worldcon but after the deadline, it doesn't count.

Because of the pandemic, some mail is being routed by sea. If you can be sure your ballot is going by air, it should arrive in time.

I am expecting online voting to open soon. If not, it will be interesting.

[dormouse1953]

The real bottleneck in getting the awards done is engraving the plaques to put on the awards. You know approximately how many rockets and bases you are going to need and order them early. (I remember waking up one morning in 2005 by a delivery of 25 Hugo rockets. It was still Peter Weston doing them then, or the company he used to own.)

Presumably with only a virtual ceremony this year, they could engrave the awards after the ceremony and then ship them to the winners.

In 2005, it took me about a day to type in the ballots and get the results. Of course, I started typing in before the deadline.

[arkessian]

Those of us that are not allowed out of the house to post a letter, and can't hand it over to anyone else to post (hardly an essential act) are SOL then.

I could perhaps lodge my letter in between two stones in the front garden and email a local volunteer to come and collect it after 72 hours so the virus will have died... By then, in the usual weather (we have weather and not climate) it will be too wet to be legible when it reaches its destination.

[(Anonymous)]

You get virus on your hands, you wash your hands in soap and water, virus gone.

You could leave a stamped letter out for any passer by to post. Maybe inside a plastic bag.
Supposedly, P. G. Wodehouse would toss all his correspondence out of his apartment window, stamped. and a kind soul would deal with it - presumably different people and not his carer. I just was reading about the guy whose experiment was leaving wallets around and he got most of those back.

[arkessian]

I don't get passers by unless I commission them specially -- in the sticks here.

[thewayne]

You'd think they'd reuse the same server code that worked for previous WorldCons.

Silly me. You'd think 3+ decades as an IT guy would disabuse me of the idea of code reuse.

[bibliofile]

Hugo admins are better at being consistent across the years than worldcons. The Hugos are a seperate entity, with folks that persist across conventions, not limited to just one. So it's more robust than many fannish enterprises. So there's that.

Not sure if we should worry yet.

[graydon]

Mail, at least parcel mail, from East Asia is taking months. There are some indications that it's coming on a boat and passing through Panama. (Sent from Guangzhou; goes through customs in Mississauga, which is the first notice of its arrival in Canada. Took something like fifty five days.)

Were I trying to get a paper ballot to Worldcon by the deadline, I think I'd resort to DHL. (Who continue to seem functional, in a reliable "add a couple days" way. Everybody else is getting highly variable. Not a statistically significant sample, etc.)

[(Anonymous)]

As ridiculous as it is, fax (can it be done internationally? how much does it cost internationally?) almost sounds like a good idea compared to the mail-in ballot.

Either way, I'd like to know why voting is taking so long. In past years, it's opened long before the Hugo packet.