The true winner on this year's Hugo Award final ballot isn't the Sad Puppies campaign of Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen but Vox Day and his more extreme Rabid Puppies. As Mike Glyer demonstrates over on File 770, the Rabid Puppies slate actually placed more items on the ballot than the related Sad Puppies campaign slate. This indicates to me that Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day) has more power and ability to get people to game the Hugo Award nomination process than either Larry or Brad.
Of course, Larry and Brad have gone to great lengths to distance their campaign from Vox Day's. No doubt this is because of VD's well-documented attacks on others, such as how he used SFWA's Twitter feed to link to comments he made calling N. K. Jemisin a “half-savage,” for which he was eventually expelled from the organization. When you state you want to make the genre inclusive for everyone, as Larry and Brad say, then Vox Day is a very inconvenient finger in everyone's eye.
No, Larry and Brad don't want to be associated with VD. But they also must not mind benefiting from his campaign. I say this because it's the only reason I can think of for why they're not calling Vox Day out for the obvious conflict of interest of his Rabid Puppies campaign turning out the block vote for both himself and his own publishing house.
As Charles Stross points out, a Finish publishing house founded last year by Vox Day landed a nine nominated works on the ballot because of the Rabid Puppies campaign. And this isn't taking into account the two nominations for long and short editor Vox Day also scored.
Larry and Brad made a big point about how their campaign aims to fight against a corrupted Hugo Award nominating process. That they want to return the power in the genre to those who are supposedly being overlooked.
So I ask: How is the Rabid Puppies campaign, which benefited the very person running it, not simply a continuation of the corruption Larry and Brad are supposedly fighting against? I'd also love to hear if Larry and Brad support Vox Day receiving dual Best Editor nominations, especially when VD was the one who urged people to vote for himself in those categories.
Am I the only one who is amused that the Puppy's big step in supposedly cleaning up the genre turns out to include cranking the dial on genre corruption to 11?