[svl]

As others have said, between competing bids for who'd host Worldcon in 2023, China got the most votes (from registered fans at an earlier Worldcon).

However, there was also controversy about this, as a very large number of those votes lacked an address (a minimal safety feature to give some indication that votes belong to distinct people). The responsible committee decided not to count them, but was overruled. If it wasn't for that, Chengdu wouldn't have won the bid.

[saiya-jin]

That's an obvious scam that any trained eye spots in 5 seconds, and very typical for more primitive undemocratic societies like Russia and China. I am curious why nobody reacted since at least few must have realized this.

Once you clarify you deal with scam no voting can overrule anything, you can easily go public and expose people if they would keep pushing for it. This is 2024, we have (at least some) tools to deal with such things in such situations.

[pavel_lishin]

According to Charles Stross's explanation of how Worldcons work, you don't really need to fake votes - you can just buy them at $50/pop:

> My understanding is that a bunch of Chinese fans who ran a successful regional convention in Chengdu (population 21 million; slightly more than the New York metropolitan area, about 30% more than London and suburbs) heard about the worldcon and thought "wouldn't it be great if we could call ourselves the world science fiction convention?"

> They put together a bid, then got a bunch of their regulars to cough up $50 each to buy a supporting membership in the 2021 worldcon and vote in site selection. It doesn't take that many people to "buy" a worldcon—I seem to recall it's on the order of 500-700 votes—so they bought themselves the right to run the worldcon in 2023. And that's when the fun and games started.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldco...

No scam involved at all, to be honest - just regular voting-with-money.