By the definition you're using, all candidates are slates. It's therefore a bit useless.
The fundamental issue that people have with the SP campaign isn't that it's a slate (ie, that it's a set of candidates that people tend to vote together or not at all). Yes, yes, they say that, but that's just what makes it break the nomination rules. (note: break, not violate).
The fundamental issue is that it's a campaign. Once people are successful campaigning for hugos, or worse, as in this year, to keep competing ballots off the ballot, it will never stop.
No Award is a "slate" in that people who vote it for certain categories have it dominate their nominations. Although frankly, slates are meaningless for the votes, so this isn't even a valid statement -- there is a slate for the final vote, and it consists of each candidate + no award in any order you choose.
But it's not a campaign, even though people have "campaigned" for it. The response is far too diverse and broad for it to be the result of any of the campaigns, rather than the existing meme that campaigning threats to the Hugos have to be responded to by No Award, as has been true for over 25 years.
Your statement re "they'll only go around your rules" is just laughably false. It assumes that campaigns have infinite power -- rather than, as any political group has, just the power to abuse holes in the rules. Make the rules better (ie, have less holes while still fulfilling their central goals) and slates become much less able to abuse them.
Obviously, if a campaign has infinite numbers, money, and interest, then you can't defeat them directly (instead, you have to wait for them to get bored). But there's no evidence that that's the case, rather than a small number of people (250, at highest estimate) abusing rules that were never designed to resist abuse.
That any fix to the rules would also make them -generally- better i.e. produce more representative ballots that are resistent to accidental slates (like the Buffy and Dr. Who crows deciding on their three favourite episodes, and managing to get all of them nominated, or Seanan McGuire listing what she did last year and her fans nominating the ones they liked, resulting in multiple nominees in the same category from the same group of nominators) is if anything central -- the fact that this would make the Hugos less vulnerable to deliberate hijack from a motivated campaign is a bonus.
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Date: 2015-04-21 04:50 pm (UTC)The fundamental issue that people have with the SP campaign isn't that it's a slate (ie, that it's a set of candidates that people tend to vote together or not at all). Yes, yes, they say that, but that's just what makes it break the nomination rules. (note: break, not violate).
The fundamental issue is that it's a campaign. Once people are successful campaigning for hugos, or worse, as in this year, to keep competing ballots off the ballot, it will never stop.
No Award is a "slate" in that people who vote it for certain categories have it dominate their nominations. Although frankly, slates are meaningless for the votes, so this isn't even a valid statement -- there is a slate for the final vote, and it consists of each candidate + no award in any order you choose.
But it's not a campaign, even though people have "campaigned" for it. The response is far too diverse and broad for it to be the result of any of the campaigns, rather than the existing meme that campaigning threats to the Hugos have to be responded to by No Award, as has been true for over 25 years.
Your statement re "they'll only go around your rules" is just laughably false. It assumes that campaigns have infinite power -- rather than, as any political group has, just the power to abuse holes in the rules. Make the rules better (ie, have less holes while still fulfilling their central goals) and slates become much less able to abuse them.
Obviously, if a campaign has infinite numbers, money, and interest, then you can't defeat them directly (instead, you have to wait for them to get bored). But there's no evidence that that's the case, rather than a small number of people (250, at highest estimate) abusing rules that were never designed to resist abuse.
That any fix to the rules would also make them -generally- better i.e. produce more representative ballots that are resistent to accidental slates (like the Buffy and Dr. Who crows deciding on their three favourite episodes, and managing to get all of them nominated, or Seanan McGuire listing what she did last year and her fans nominating the ones they liked, resulting in multiple nominees in the same category from the same group of nominators) is if anything central -- the fact that this would make the Hugos less vulnerable to deliberate hijack from a motivated campaign is a bonus.