Jita Park Speakers Corner

The simple solution to this is to just run the regular election, with one vote per account, and the top X people are full candidates.

...and you've just answered your thread's question. Can we get on to important topics now?

There's two sides to this; on one hand there does need to be a somewhat limited number of candidates on the final ballot or else you can end up with many wasted votes with little margin between them. On the other hand, fewer choices runs a risk of ending up with 'entrenched' CSM members who remain there each year by virtue of their previous experience.
We could shake things up in that respect by removing the publicly-revealed real name requirement for candidates, provided that they still verify themselves with CCP. It's crazy how we're missing out on many potentionally great representatives because they're forced to give RL details to several hundred thousand nerds.

But at the end of the day this all comes down to voter motivation. If everyone was smart, informed and properly researched things then we'd always have the best CSM.
If they're don't care about the CSM at all, at best they'll vote for gimmick options or the first one whose portrait / name they like. Then we're always going to end up with what we have - bloc candidates at the top spots and a random distribution of votes around the remaining hopefuls.

Perhaps the best approach is more information for voters, such as letting candidates write a very short summary on their goals on the voting page itself, along with a link to their more detailed thread. Otherwise it's just a list of names to click at.

I have to leave for the day - so don't take my silence as me abandoning this subject... it is just that the family calls.

After yesterday's spirited debate on voting reform. CCP Xhagen and CSM7, judging by the OP, feel that voter turnout is too low and that organized groups have too much influence on the Council as a result. Now you can take one of two conclusions from this - 1) That organizing and motivating players to vote is something that needs to be curbed (as Trebor seems to believe) or that 2) Goonswarm/nullsec blocs are better at motivating EVE players to vote then CCP and most of the CSM are capable of doing at present, and that CCP should strive to improve CSM election turnout as a whole to a level that nullsec blocs (and wormholes, and FW) have proven capable of achieving. Personally, I side with the latter.

This begs the question - what is wrong with the current CSM advertising process when it relates to the EVE everyman?
Voting is simple and easily accessed (click a banner ad and choose a candidate), the CSM representatives offload reams and reams of documentation, maintain blogs, entertain interviews with third-party sites, post on forums. Yet, as Frying Doom bemoans, "education on the CSM" is woefully insufficient. Now, one can write off these bleats of highseccers as them being as uninterested in the CSM as they are in the EVE world as a whole beyond their veldspar roid belt, and that it's unavoidable. But I'd argue that the current CSM material, while certainly extremely thorough, is not sufficiently engaging to the casual viewer. How do we go about doing that?

This leads to another matter that has come up, the matter of low quality CSM candidates. I think Hans Jagerblitzen's brochure on his political platform was superb, and that material detailing one's stances should be mandatory to achieve CSM candidacy. One long form for detailed reading, one shortform that can be consumed in approximately a minute for casuals to decide if they feel the long form is woth reading or not. It's absurd that a thread in Jita Park can get locked for 'no content' but a bid for CSM candidacy cannot. Last election, a third party developed a CSM political questionairre for undecided voters to fill out and see which CSM candidate's positions best matched their own. I propose CCP take on such low-hanging fruit itself and integrate it with banner ads and the CSM candidates' short form candidacy bids. In order for anyone interested in the CSM right now to find out where they stand, they have to read through reams of material, hundreds of pages of CSM notes, sift through dozens of garbage candidates, etc. Is it any wonder that most lose interest, and the rest vote along lines of "he's in my alliance so I'll vote for him"?

After reading Nicolo da'Vicenza's post, I'm struck by another point. How is it, precisely, that we know that highsec is under-educated about the CSM? The posting about how highsec needs to vote, how they're not voting, and so on comes in torrents but from very few people. Honestly, a lot of it is just Frying Doom posting so often that if you forget his name it seems like a consensus - but it's just Frying Doom. And it's Frying Doom operating from the starting point that nobody from highsec could either not care about the CSM or not oppose the evil goonies, so they must be uneducated. That's the perennial excuse of the losers of elections: the voters are just too dumb to listen to me.

Highsec has gotten plenty of people on the CSM. Most of them, however, have not been successes (Jade, Issler, etc) and have faded out of memory. On the other hand, there's the memorable 0.0 bloc delegates (DJ, Mittens) who are memorable mostly because they were also the CEO of Goonswarm and consequently produced a great deal of gnashing of teeth from the people who suffered under Goonswarm's (ingame) heel.

Now granted, I personally think choosing Issler as a highsec delegate may have been a poor decision but I can't really think of impressive-seeming ones that were running. There was one guy who seemed to have a good head on his sholders but nobody had ever heard of and whose name I have already forgotten: highsec may simply not be throwing up good candidates.

I don't think it should be taken as a given that highsec is uneducated and unknowing about the CSM and that's screwed them, I'd like to see something - besides pointing to the volume of Frying Doom posts - that suggests that.

Highsec and 0.0 are almost like 2 different games that share a server in many ways, and yes - in highsec most of the organising is done for the residents by NPCs, CONCORD, etc, so there simply isn't much reason for the residents there to develop the sort of organisational infrastructure that we use just to survive on a day-to-day basis (and which can be re-tooled towards things like CSM election campaigns).

The ideal solution would be to re-work highsec game mechanics entirely in a way that better encouraged organised co-operation so that the players there had at least basic political structures of their own to use for electioneering, but that may be slightly beyond your remit

The essential problem with nonparticipation is that anyone can read anything into it. It's disaffection! It's contentment! It's The Man disenfranchising the majority! My guess is that the majority of silent high sec is essentially content. The capacity for organization may or may not be there, but there's no particular need to organize. It's no accident that the two exceptions this cycle, Kelduum and Issler, were elected to fix the most antiquated clickfests in highsec life: corp management, POS management, PI and industry. However, since those are also the most antiquated clickfests in lowsec, nullsec, and WH life (shout out to the directional scanner, though!), that doesn't say a great deal about high sec participation. You could argue that Kelduum was a bloc candidate, as well.

If the voting system is to be reformed, then full STV, with alternates chosen by the voters, should be the new way. Withdrawing candidates can always recommend that their voters that they throw their support behind another candidate, but I see no reason to make that binding on the voters. They should not have to fill out the entire sorted list of 14. If they only pick two or three candidates, their vote only shifts between the candidates they voted for as the more preferred candidates fall short.

Also, the chairmanship, and all other committee roles, should be chosen by the elected members of the board. It's not a feather in anyone's cap, it's a role of service to the committee that demands particular talents and a high level of commitment. Past chairmen may have been good choices by fortunate coincidence, but that's not an argument for reducing the role to a prize in a popularity contest.

The ultrarich traders of highsec are of highsec because that's where the trading is done. They would be the ultrarich traders of null, if the major trade hub was in npc null instead.

Much like people in null or low hate it when high sec people call them nullbears, or gatesquatters, or blobbers, it's really hard to group an entire population of the game under one label. High sec incursion runners, pirates, war dec griefers and traders have never once mined a single block of ice. Many of them perhaps never once ran a level 4 mission, let alone grinded them continuously for hours. You just simply can't group all of a population like that, as it will always fail.

I believe high sec 'might' be underrepresented simply because there are very few issues that only effect high sec. Crimewatch and War Decs are the only two i think that greatly impact high sec more than the others. As such, null and low candidates already deal with all the other issues, and have a greater stake in getting them fixed. Industry for example is much easier in high sec, so backing a null sec industrial candidate makes as much sense as a high sec one, as null would push for better and more robust changes.

That's why i think you should be able to vote for a council, not just one member. If i want to vote for the null sec guy that wants to improve industry, i know that improvement will have a trickle up/down effect on all sec industry. The same for the Crimewatch candidate, or the WH candidate, or the FW candidate. It's entirely possible for one player to cross over into many parts of the game, and their ability to vote should reflect that.

And this is why a Platform system would most benefit these topics.