How Often Do I Agree with the Hugo Electorate?

In my recent post comparing my final ballot to the winners of the 2023 Hugo Awards, I noted that my first place choice and the actual final winner were the same in four of the nine categories in which I vote. I then speculated, "I think this is a record."

But was it a record? Good question! I trawled backward through my old posts to see how often the broader Hugo electorate had made the right choice (i.e., my choice).

Here's how many categories my first-place choice and the voters' has coincided in each year:

• 2017: 4 (Novelette / Short Story / Related Work / Dramatic Long)
• 2018: 1 (Short Story)
• 2019: 1 (Dramatic Long)
• 2020: 1 (Novel)
• 2021: 4 (Short Story / Related Work / Dramatic Short / Lodestar)
• 2022: 1 (Lodestar)
• 2023: 4 (Novel / Short Story / Related Work / Dramatic Long)

Far from being a record, four matches is my second most common result! I had not realized that my distribution was so sharply bimodal; either I agree in one category or four. Never zero, two, or three!

I then wondered how I did more broadly. To figure this out, I looked at whatever I ranked first and then averaged where it ranked in the final results. That is to say, if my picks for first came in fifth, sixth, first, first, sixth, first, first, and second, that would average out to 2.9. A lower score is better; thus on this graph, I've flipped things around.

You'll see that 2023 actually is a record at 2.3; I've never been so consistently in agreement with the other voters. My low point was 2019; I don't know what was wrong with everyone else. 

I am not sure what we can infer from this: it may be that in years where I match up well, there's a weak finalist pool and thus only one obvious winner for me and everyone else.

Having compiled this data, it was then easy to also figure out what was the category where my tastes are most often aligned with the broader electorate's:

I didn't find anything too surprising here. Dramatic Long usually has one very good choice and a bunch of Marvel movies, so I am not surprised to see I usually line up well here. I have picked the eventual first-place winner three out of seven times.

Two categories do much worse on a regular basis. I have never picked a first-place winner in Graphic Story; indeed, one time my first-place pick finished in second, and all other times fourth or sixth. But it is a category usually made up of a bad set of finalists (in my opinion), and one where my tastes clearly do not line up with others' at all. Novella fares even worse, with my first-place pick coming in fifth on average. I have never picked the winner, and my pick for the winner has come in sixth three times and in seventh once! (In 2019, I liked the set of finalists so little that I voted No Award in first.) Though apparently me and the voters do pretty well for Short Story,* when it comes to novella-length fiction, we just do not get on.

Which is to say, the electorate loves Tordotcom novellas and I do not.

* My first-place choice has come in first four out of seven times, actually, which is my best result for any category, but this is counterbalanced by my first-place choices coming in fourth, seventh, and fifth in the three other years.