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Keep in mind that you have be to registered and pay a fee to vote, but from the sound of this they don't verify names.

The total tally here is of less than 4,000 votes. It's not surprising that people game this, the economic gains of having a book listed as a Hugo award winner must be huge.

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Huge by sci-fi novel standards. You could gains tens of thousands of dollars.

So basically nothing. (I realize that comes across as blase but it really isn't a lot of money in the scheme of things.)

Do you know what percentage of published books in the USA each year is that sell more than 1000 copies?

Isn't that the wrong baseline? I'm pretty sure the proportion of, IDK, disc golfers who win more than $100 in prize money is tiny, but that doesn't mean that a disc golfing tournament offering $100 needs to institute a massive anti-fraud crackdown.

Very few. That doesn't change the fact that selling more than that is still basically beer money for the most part with very rare exceptions.

Yes, especially since it cost them around $20k to submit the votes.

Whoever did it, it almost certainly wasn't because they were trying to make money from increased sales.

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