(Aside: This is pretty similar to how eloH tried to game my entry in the BioWare mod contest, except eloH has no minions to do his bidding and had to create a bunch of sock-puppet accounts pretending to be you guys.)
As I noted earlier, the new E Pluribus Hugo rules will make slate voting much more difficult (five times more difficult, to be precise), but they don't take effect until 2017, so there's one more year where partisans could potentially monkey with the nomination process.
Charlie shows up in the comments and makes a couple good observations, notably that while that's possible, he doesn't really think it's likely:
There has been much howling among confused puppies to the effect "I paid $40 for my vote and WE GOT THIS??!??!!!ELEVENTY!!!" -- they didn't seem to understand that "no award" was always an option on the Hugo ballot, or that gaming the nominations was no guarantee of success at the ballot box.
This year's crop of $40 griefers are, I think, much less likely to stump up the cash to be disappointed two years running. The puppies may have a hard core of supporters who're willing to put $40 in the slot machine repeatedly, and they may find some new recruits with money to burn, but I suspect a lot of their first-time supporters will be thinking "once burned, twice shy".
He's also got specific details on how he personally voted in the Hugos this year; tl;dr he applied tit-for-tat.
And then there's a pretty good discussion of good science fiction from the past year.
Scalzi has a postmortem too.
The Puppies continue to appear genuinely flummoxed that the Hugo voters rejected everything and everyone they slated (except Guardians of the Galaxy, which as previously noted they can hardly take credit for), arguing on one memorable occasion that if The Three Body Problem, the eventual best novel Hugo winner, had been on the slates, it would have finished below “No Award,” thus proving the bankruptcy of voting for “No Award” in the first place.
This is a bit like saying that if the person who didn’t get on the bus you then proceeded to drive off a cliff were on the bus, they would probably be dead now — it’s trivially true, but misses the point that you drove the bus off the cliff. The Puppies knew that slating was anathema to the large mass of Hugo voters — they had a dry run the year before, proffering a limited slate with Sad Puppies 2, and saw their nominees largely finish in fifth place or below “No Award” — but they did it anyway and now want to be shocked, shocked that their antics predictably resulted in their nominees doing very poorly indeed.
The going line in those quarters at the moment is that the blanket “No Award” just proves the Hugo Awards are corrupt. Well, no, that’s stupid. What the blanket “No Award” judgment shows is that the large mass of Hugo voters don’t like people trying to game the system for their own reasons that are largely independent of actual quality of work. In the Sad Puppy case the reasons were to vent anger and frustration at having not been given awards before, and for Brad Torgersen to try to boost his own profile as a tastemaker by nominating his pals (with a few human shields thrown in). In the Rabid Puppy case it was because Vox Day is an asshole who likes being an asshole to other people. And in both cases there was a thin candy shell of “Fuck the SJWs” surrounding the whole affair.
The shorter version of the above: You can’t game the system and then complain that people counteracting your gaming of the system goes to show the system is gamed. Or you can, but no one is obliged to take you seriously when you do.
I managed to get in an argument with a puppy on a Robot 6 thread last week; his logic on how all this went down was about as coherent as you would expect. ("The thing Hugo voters did after the Puppies intentionally biased the nominations proves how biased the Hugo voters are!" -- also, there's a good bit where somebody keeps ranting that the voters didn't even read the nominees -- as if the slate voters did -- and then Kurt Busiek shows up and says "Actually, I did; or at least I read far enough into them to determine that I didn't think they deserved a Hugo.")