An alternative explanation for the irregularities being so obvious is that the committee may have wanted to draw attention to the fact that they weren't free to follow the correct process...

Hmm, people in the comments on file770.com are saying the idea that the stats could be something like a hostage signal is wildly out of character with at least one of the American committee members who was apparently happy to get free vacations and lots of presents in China...

@thalassa and also there was nothing stopping the *American* committee members from just coming out and saying something if they wanted the irregularities to be caught

exurbe has been writing about how censors historically generally wanted to be obvious in a show of power, which is def an interesting angle to consider: https://www.exurbe.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/

I’m not sure it entirely lines up with what I’ve seen of China’s censorship (which puts a lot of emphasis on reviewing materials before release so doesn’t have to deal with so much of the “how do you track down every copy of every banned book?”) but then again…they do seem oddly fine with shows using terrible obvious dubs over censored words/lines so a lack of subtlety doesn’t seem to bother them much at the v least

@thalassa the thing thats really bothering me tho is why would one person/group use two totally unrelated methods of manipulating the results? If you’re going to the trouble of manipulating the results to drop certain titles off the list, why then go for the much more obvious “ineligible” marker for other titles?

@Satsuma You mean the possibility that candidates with an intermediate number of votes are missing and potentially their votes were transferred to the top 7 or so? We don't know yet whether (some of) that happened but I could imagine they wanted to doctor a huge difference in votes between the shortlisted candidates and the rest so there would be no way to attack the shortlists, simply because it's unclear what was done to the numbers.

@Satsuma I think obscuring how exactly they may have manipulated also serves the chilling effect, so people can't reliably predict what's allowed. I thought the naivety of some commenters on file770 was amazing, they said if it was due to some law, they should just point to the law 🤣 As if authoritarian regimes enforce obedience by clearly defined laws and due process.
Anyway, there could be additional subtle manipulations with economic interests behind them that they didn't want to publicize.