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Comments (4)
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Posted by John DeNardo at Monday April 02, 2007 at 12:04 AM
© 2007 SF Signal
Any explanation for how they could make a mistake like that in the Hugo nominations? Almost seems like an April Fools joke...
Posted by scottsh on Monday April 02, 2007 at 12:12 PM
http://www.nippon2007.us/hugo_correction_faq.php - has the explanation. Interesting - 'error in the data'. I like the acknowledgement that it could have been construed as an April Fools joke though 
.
Posted by scottsh on Monday April 02, 2007 at 12:16 PM
My first thought was that it was an April Fools bit, but so many others (much closer to the process than I am) confirmed it -- or they are in on the joke or were similarly duped. In the end I decided that Pan's Labyrinth made a better nominee than PotC: Dead Man's Chest...based solely on critical acclaim, or course, since I have seen neither.
Posted by John on Monday April 02, 2007 at 12:51 PM
It's not a joke. The announcement itself says that is it not an April Fools joke. The Administrators wish it was, because it's very frustrating and annoying to discover errors like this. I don't have the specifics, but I was told that the data in that category was corrupted in such a way that the totals appeared to match the way they should. It wasn't until they audited the figures that the found the error. They decided it was more important to get the corrections out as soon as they possibly could than hold off announcing for another 24 hours so that the news broke on April 2 instead of April 1.
I've been a Hugo Awards administrator myself. I can certainly see how one could make an error counting ballots. It is an intensely manual process, and actually quite difficult to automate, particularly at the nominating stage, where there is lots of variation in nominee names. There have been nominating ballot errors in the past, as a matter of fact. The Hugo Administrator deserves nothing but praise for notifying people as soon as she found the error.
Posted by Kevin Standlee on Monday April 02, 2007 at 8:02 PM