General Voting Information

Voting is the second stage of the Hugo Awards process. It happens after the first stage—nominations—has completed and the final ballot is announced. To arrive at the final ballot, the Hugo Administrators take the works that are nominated in each category by WSFS members of the previous Worldcon and Seattle Worldcon 2025 WSFS members as of January 31, 2025, and tally them using the E Pluribus Hugo (EPH) system. The EPH system weights the votes and determines which has the most nominations. The Hugo Subcommittee then determines eligibility based on the WSFS constitution, and finally contacts finalists to create the final Hugo Awards ballot.

Once voting opens, members get to rank their choices in order of preference with “1” for first place, “2” for second place and so forth. The last section on this page contains some additional notes on voting that should be considered when evaluating the works.

Seattle Worldcon 2025 WSFS members get to rank works in order of their own preference. The Hugo Subcommittee then utilizes the rules as laid out in the WSFS Constitution to determine who is the winner.

In order to assist WSFS members with being able to evaluate the works, our Hugo Packet team reaches out to finalists to see if there is anything that they can provide to help WSFS members evaluate the works. Depending on the category and other rights holders, these items can vary as can the release date of the packet.

Notes on Voting

• Unranked means that you are not ranking the finalist.
• A lower preference is considered only if all the candidates ranked higher have been eliminated.
• You are not required to rank all the finalists in any category.
• If you decide not to vote in any given category, leave it “Unranked”.
• “No Award” is not an abstention. It means that none of the finalists should be given the award in question.
• If you give preference votes to finalists below your ranking of No Award, your vote will count for those finalists if all higher-ranked preferences, including No Award, are eliminated.
• If you indicate a preference for No Award and leave other finalists blank, your vote will not count for or against those finalists at all.

When the ballots are counted, all the first place votes will be tabulated.

If no finalist receives more than half of the votes, the finalist with the fewest first place votes is eliminated, and their votes are transferred to the finalists with the next preferences on those ballots.

This process of elimination of the last-placed finalist and redistribution of their votes to the next available preference continues until one finalist has more than half of all remaining votes, at which point that finalist becomes the winner (except under specific conditions described in Section 3.6 and 3.12 of the WSFS Constitution).