EVE Information Portal

Want to bet 100M that in this election we'll get >24% of the previous electorate numbers disenfrancising themselves by not voting for any candidate at all due to a percieved overly complicated voting system?
I think this will reinforcing the perception amongst thoseliving in Hi Sec that the CSM is a NULL SEC thing ( even though theoretically it would give HI SEC candidates a better chance on being elected the depressed numbers will probably have an opposite affect. I hope CCP tracks voters on where they live )

Oh so its that system. Well in that case: bloc CSM it is then. Instead of "wasting" their votes on spending more than enough to get their guy elected, they can efficiently make sure that as many of their guys get elected as they have votes to achieve. Basically it will automatically perfectly co-ordinate bloc voting.

Hilarious.

Excuse me? You say that a candidate must have a chance to be elected in order to get my vote? But how do you determine he haves a chance to be elected without counting the votes first?

I guess that something went awfully wrong between our sides of the screen...

Maybe you mean that if my first choice doens't ranks 14th or higher, then the vote goes to the second choice? Is that?

But then, what's the point in voting my first candidate first unless i think he can make it to the top 14? And how it turned that my vote is a tradeable commodity someone can arbitrarily kick up and down depending on how wisely I chose my first choice(s)?

"Y'know, you were wrong to choose Abe, Barb, Chuck, Donna, Ed, Frank and Gina, but we can proudly inform you that your vote ended up landing Howie into the 14th rank! ".

I seriously wonder what kind of briliant idiot figured that would be satisfactory...

How?

If they tell their coalition members to vote for dudes A-N in a random order, and they'd exactly split their vote between all 14. This guarantees nothing in particular.

I mean, they could probably do that with fewer candidates, but then that's not any more effective than the old system, where they just co-ordinated who voted for who.
Hell, you'd do it the same way, just generate 6 mailing lists from your alliance rosters, giving randomly selected dudes to vote for.

I admit, I have not spent long thinking about this, but that's the closest I've gotten to a scenario for gaming the system.

Hello Coalition and EVE University CSM.

I think we should have a pool as to how many CFC, HBC, and EVE University candidates get into the CSM this time around.

There are 14 possible positions.

I am going to guess 4 CFC, 4 HBC, and 2 EVE University.

I wonder who will get the four remaining spots.

Although I still don't understand 100% how exactly is supposed to work the new voting system and what would be the best voting strategy in a STV scenario, I am quite sure that at this point many potential voters would have panicked and forget about voting at all. Also I find amusingly annoying that someone thinks that my vote is a tradeable commodity and i don't really care on who's elected with it as long as he's in my list and a "innocent hand" gives him my vote.

Lower voter turnout and thus 100% bloc candidates look like the natural consequence of this whole new election system.

But then we're talking about the company who developed a dynamic music system for players who don't listen to ingame music and told everyone else to f*** off and use 3rd party apllications to listen to EVE music while playing EVE...

I posted these links in my message on the first page of the thread, but here they are again:

* Wikipedia: Single Transferable Vote
* Wikipedia: Counting single transferable votes
* OpenSTV (Software)

The second link has a good explanation of how a simple STV system works. There are many variants that have slight differences in the way vote transfers are done when a candidate reaches quota or is eliminated.

In simple STV systems, each ballot ends up helping elect one candidate (unless it gets discarded because none of the candidates on it are electable). In the more complex systems, ballots can help multiple candidates fractionally in some circumstances, but no ballot counts for more than 1 unit of voting power.

In general, the more complex systems, like Meek-STV, produce a slightly better approximation of proportional representation. But the cost is that following the narrative of the election is a little more difficult.

Arguably the most accurate STV system is Schulze-STV, but it is computationally infeasible for elections with the number of candidates and seats typical of CSM elections.

No voting system is perfect (this is called Arrow's Theorem), and all voting systems have various criteria that they meet or fail to meet (here's a table of them for single-winner elections; the single-winner version of STV is called IRV or AV). However, STV meets several very important criteria, and in particular:

"Later no harm/no help": Adding another candidate to your ballot will not alter the chance one of your higher ranked preferences will get elected. So you should feel free to vote for all the candidates you like, and rank them in the order you prefer. And you should in particular remember to put Trebor Daehdoow in there somewhere!

"Independence of Clone Alternatives": This means that if there are multiple very similar candidates, as long as you add them all to your ballot, they won't destroy each other's chances of getting elected. So in this election, if there are multiple "wormhole candidates", but only enough total votes to elect one of them, then as long as all the wormhole voters vote for them, one will get elected.

I, for one, look forward to welcoming our CFC overlords with open arms.

Go get 'em. You have my prioritized votes for ALL CFC candidates.

For Christ's sake, we're talking about a silly election in a silly videogame were 86% the potential voters didn't bothered to vote not even before the election system became some manic mathematician's toy!

How in the name of the Lord, are you expecting anyone to understand what they're voting when the "simple" explanation holds not less than TWO threshold calculation methods and EIGHT methods for allocating surpluses (and remember, we're talking about votes here, not merchandise).

CCP Xhagen is totally putting the cart before the horse, adressing election system rather than voter involvement. He can pretty much save all efforts and just ask the blocs who they want to have in the CSM, as nobody else is going to invest not even one tenth of the effort I invested so far trying to understand WTF are they going to do to my vote.

I still don't agree with the premise that "24% of votes were wasted". The system was simple. It worked.