Westercon 76 will be held at the Doubletree by Hilton SLC Airport over the weekend of July 4-7, 2024, after the write-in bid for Utah in 2024 was selected to host the convention by the Westercon 74 Business Meeting held July 3, 2022 in Tonopah, Nevada. Attending memberships are initially $50 while Supporting memberships are $25. Persons who voted in 2024 Westercon Site Selection can convert to an attending membership by paying the current attending membership less $25. The newly-selected Westercon 76 committee did not initially announce a website or guests of honor.
Selection of the site for the 2024 Site Selection was complicated because no eligible bids filed to host Westercon 76. No bids at all filed by the April 15, 2022 deadline to appear on the 2024 Site Selection Ballot. A single bid for Utah in 2024 filed with Westercon 74 in Tonopah before the close of voting on July 2, 2022; however, while the bid included a valid committee and site, it did not include a requisite non-profit organization. Under the Westercon Bylaws, bids for sites in the USA, whether appearing on the ballot or as a write-in, must include “evidence that the sponsoring organization [of the bid] is a non-profit association or corporation within the applicable state law of the sponsoring organization.”
The results of the 2024 Westercon site selection voting were as follows:
60 votes cast
2 No Preference
58 Total with Preference
55 Votes for Utah
2 Any State that protects abortion rights
1 None of the Above
Although Utah received 55 of the 58 votes with a preference, because the bid failed to specify a parent non-profit organization, it was ineligible to win the site selection voting. Consequently, the Westercon Business Meeting was empowered to select a committee under section 3.16 of the Westercon Bylaws. When a committee is selected under section 3.16, the committee does not need to provide evidence of a sponsoring non-profit organization, a facility contract, or any of the other requirements to file a bid to appear on the ballot or to run as a write-in, although the convention is still required to be held somewhere in North America west of 104° west longitude or in Hawaii.
The Westercon 74 Business Meeting voted by the requisite three-fourths majority to select the Utah in 2024 committee led by Chair Charles R. Galway and Treasurer Cheryl A. Sneddon to operate Westercon 76. The meeting did strongly recommend that the Utah committee organize as a non-profit organization or obtain the sponsorship of an existing non-profit organization at the earliest opportunity.
