Views from Medina Road

The deadline (whichever it was) has passed, the ballots are in, I've run my crack database and tabulated them. The Locus Poll winners are... But no, I can't tell you until sometime in July, after the complete results are printed in the July issue of Locus Magazine and the issue has mailed. In any event, I'm only 99.5% sure about the winners. I've filtered the raw data from the emailed ballots for duplications--multiple ballots submitted by the same person (this usually happens when someone hits the 'enter' key prematurely), and votes by one person for the same item more than once in a category. Which the rules say you're not supposed to do... it's tempting to throw such ballots out entirely, but we give them the benefit of the doubt and simply delete the unauthorized multiple votes. It's curious that such voters think we won't notice, tsk tsk.

But I haven't yet accounted for all the write-in votes, which don't automatically tabulate using database queries since every write-in vote is in formatted slightly differently... "Sawyer, Humans", "Humans by Rob Sawyer", "Sawyer Humans (Tor)", and so on. It's extremely unlikely that write-in votes will change the *winner* in any category, but it is theoretically possible.

I'll do that this weekend. And I'll do some more analysis of voting patterns, as I started to back in February after the initial batch of ballots came in.

I've hand-edited the template for this blog to place the Comment link; my guess about why it didn't work initially is that I'd removed the default "posted by" tag at the end of each post (which seems redundant), and so the automatic update of the template to place the comment tags didn't know where to put them. Or something. Does anyone have a comment about that?