Jita Park Speakers Corner

What always strikes me about these "let's give people _______ if they vote!" arguments is how you're on one hand admitting that the CSM itself just isn't going to ever be interesting enough on its own to get a significantly larger amount of people to vote, but on the other hand ignoring that very fact in the name of giving a meaningless inflation to the number of voters that turn out.

Also if you're going to try to get CCP to bribe people into voting, why not go whole hog and give out special edition ships or clothes or implants or whatever? It's not like there's much of a difference between that and some vanity tag, and hell, actual in-game items wouldn't carry the stupid scarlet letter connotations that an "I voted" tag would, so they'd be better.

Or you could go the other way and realize that maybe, just maybe the CSM and CCP combined have done a pretty lousy job of selling the CSM to players. CCP already realized that and made steps towards changing it with their devblog - maybe the CSM needs to get on board with that train of thought too?

How about you explain why it's important that a CSM member knows if a player has voted or not instead? It sort of runs counter to your claim in the other thread that this CSM won't be insular.

I'd like to know so that if, for instance, people are complaining about the CSM being "unrepresentative", I can advise them that not voting has the expected result of not being represented. Conversely if the complainer has voted, then I can have a different discussion with him.

Ahh, so it should happen so you can help reinforce negative stereotypes about the CSM (i.e. that they only look out for their own). That sure is a thing.

I'd like to know so that if, for instance, people are complaining about the CSM being "unrepresentative", I can advise them that not voting has the expected result of not being represented. Conversely if the complainer has voted, then I can have a different discussion with him.

Ok so the CSM is a PR stunt, these forums are crap, people are insane and the CSM should only be for Null.

Not really sure why your still posting, you have shown that your reasons for not wanting this change is entirely selfish, to keep the voting numbers down you will fight any change that would mean more people will vote.

Ahh, so it should happen so you can help reinforce negative stereotypes about the CSM (i.e. that they only look out for their own). That sure is a thing.

The thing with forced voting is that, with something like the CSM, you don't necessarily want voters just for the sake of having more votes, you want more participants. People who will vote because they feel they want to be represented, and who might actually pay attention to what's going on post-election, that kind of thing. Someone who votes because their client forced them to and then ignore the process are as useless as people who don't vote. It's just window-dressing that keeps any real solutions (if there are any) further from being found.

Definitely agree with the second part, though. It's an important philosophical thing that constantly is missed when this topic comes up - any voting system in the world is never aiming to maximize representation of people, it's to maximize representation of VOTERS. Much was made about "GOONS COULD HAVE PUT 3 CANDIDATES IN THE TOP 7!!!!", but we had 1/6th of the votes. With 14 seats, that's just great numbers, and no legitimate voting system in the world is going to change that - hence Trebor's "modifications" to standard STV that literally would have made our votes count for less than anyone else's. That's the road you head down when you decide to play with voting systems instead of trying to convince people why they should bother participating.

We discussed this on PODSIDE podcast last week.

My suggestion (as a player, not CSM) was to try to give a tax break to people who vote, even 1% less on refining or market taxes. Not much but an edge for those who pay attention

Yes it might create a larger donkey vote as people randomly vote to get the break but that would be filtered out as background noise and we might actually see people give more interest to the system as a result.

The tax break would not even have to last the entire year.

I have always felt that carrots work better than sticks in motivating people to move in the right direction

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