News 2025 Hugo Awards 2025 Hugo Awards Nomination Statistics Reveal Several Close Final Ballot Races Many notable Hugo Award nominees just missed the cut in 2025. By Matthew Byrd | Published on September 3, 2025 Image: Working Title Films Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Working Title Films While the 2025 Hugo Awards winners were revealed a couple of weeks ago, the event’s organizers have since released a series of supplemental statistics that reveal how the winners for each category were determined. Most interestingly, they also recently released a report that shows just how close many of the initial nominees came to making the final ballot. For context, nominations for the Hugo Awards are counted using a system that has been dubbed E Pluribus Hugo (EPH). The nominee breakdown sheet mentioned above explains exactly how that system works, but it’s basically an elimination program that turns nominations into “points” that ultimately help determine which nominees make the final ballot. Such systems are designed to help decide which nominees advance to the final ballot in the likely event that multiple nominees receive the same number of initial votes. They can help make tough determining calls in competitive races, and the 2025 Hugo Awards certainly featured quite a few such races. For instance, Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees also just missed the finalist list for the Best Graphic Story or Comic category by one vote, while the Doctor Who episode “Rogue” was one vote shy of making the finalist list for the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form award. It was also noted that three Doctor Who episodes qualifying for that finalist list would have triggered a provision in the awards rules that would have required one of the three episodes to be excluded from the final vote.  This sheet also helps explain what happened to notable initial candidates in other major categories. Helldivers 2 just missed the Best Game or Interactive Work cut by a single vote, while The Substance narrowly missed the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form cut in the final round of voting. It also shows that nominees that did make the initial final ballot in their respective categories (such as Moonstorm in the Lodestar Award race) later had their nominations withdrawn, while other selections (like Dune the Musical Show) were ultimately deemed ineligible for their respective categories. The full nominee breakdown is very much worth reading for both a better look into the mechanics of the voting process and to see just how competitive many of these categories were. Most importantly, it should help you find a few new names for your reading/watchlist. [end-mark] The post 2025 Hugo Awards Nomination Statistics Reveal Several Close Final Ballot Races appeared first on Reactor.