More Words, Deeper Hole

You say "The Hugo's voting statistics are transparent, but the overall process is not." Okay, what's not transparent? What's not explained on the Hugo Awards web site? We go to some effort over there to explain the voting process in great detail. The rules themselves are published (see this document for the WSFS constitution as of the beginning of this year's Worldcon). And there are people (starting with me) that will bend over backwards to explain how the process works if you just ask.

There is no such thing, nor will there ever be, an award "given by all fans." You can't create it, because it's not actually possible to get the opinion of all fans. So that "only some fans" argument isn't relevant.

Of course the Hugo Award is the award presented by the members of the World Science Fiction Convention. It's a large club. Anyone can join, but it's still a club. That's a given. It always has been a popularly-voted award selected by the people willing to buy a Worldcon membership.

As many people have pointed out, while you may consider US$50-60 to be a prohibitive amount, it currently comes with (in effect) a collection of e-publications whose value almost certainly exceeds the monetary cost of the membership dues. And if you made the membership cost zero (which possibly is what you would personally prefer), then you'll end up replacing your "too exclusive" argument with a "too inclusive" one.

The voter turnout this year for the Hugo Award was not only more votes than ever cast in a Hugo election, but also the highest percentage voter turnout of the eligible electorate since we started keeping sufficiently good statistics to be able to measure it. Attacking the legitimacy of the results by "only around half the eligible voters bothered to vote" is similar to saying, "The US election results aren't valid because only a small fraction of the people eligible to vote actually did so." Now some people will make that argument, but they aren't likely to be taken seriously.

(Besides, I wouldn't want an election process that forced people to vote who didn't want to do so. In a free society, the right to vote should always include the right to abstain.)