Additionally, isn't it just nominations and not actual rewards? Why is everybody flipping out about it?
By filling the entire ballot with their slate, they've (essentially) pushed out a lot of very deserving candidates out over sheer politics. Many authors who would have gotten a spot there are now not even in the running, and instead we're probably going to see multiple categories where the first place goes to literally no one.
In prior Sad Puppies campaigns, they only nominated a small number of candidates, which meant that even if they managed to get a spot unfairly, any popular work would still be in the running against their candidate. This year, many of those works aren't even in consideration. it's very destructive to the spirit of the awards, and frankly, a lot of the things they nominated are awful.
Sci-fi is also such a vague genre that there really should be some right-wing authors interspersed throughout. Why is it such a big deal that their fans voted for them? Orson Scott Card is pretty infamously homophobic and yet Ender's Game is still probably one of the most famous Sci-Fi novels / universes ever.
Honestly, the big deal is that they're orchestrating this in such a manner to subvert the normal democratic process for the award show. You might imagine that people who want a good, functioning award show wouldn't like it. Also, a good number of the authors featured are, quite frankly, pretty bad, and really don't deserve a spot on the ballot and would never have received one without, again, subverting the voting process.
Orson Scott Card, as you might note, has won multiple Hugo awards. He managed to do so without needing his own personal army to stuff the ballot box, much like Heinlein managed to do despite having very controversial politics. I think a lot of these guys would like to fancy themselves as Heinlein, given the amount of military sci-fi shit they nominated, but, honestly, let's not be delusional here. The Sad Puppies campaign is exclusively because these works could not succeed on their own.