Jita Park Speakers Corner

I mean, since you guys keep saying "there's wide-spread acknowledgement that this is An Issue", why isn't there more people in favor of the change in that thread, or any change for that matter?

yes, this was somehow much more productive then anticipated, thanks a lot for clearing this up

You're welcome.

Hans, YOU (you being CSM) were the ones after a discussion, apparently. You also bothered to participate in the thread, decided against answering the question that you just answered now, all the while trotting out the same line about how the thread was just for discussion.

The entire proposal from Trebor was a straightforward attack. You may not realize this, and it certainly may not be your fault, but your complete refusal to even acknowledge that up until this point combined with you participating in the thread anyway was rightfully seen as you being complicit. Had you actually shared this opinion you have when the thread was still just getting started, the thread itself may have been avoided (though your colleagues going for the dismissal/denial wouldn't have helped regardless). Either way, you were a very direct part in creating the problem, whether you're willing to admit that or not.





This was your first post in that thread. At no point does it share your opinion on Trebor's "Requirement #3", and in fact is downright mocking of anyone who found a problem with it. The thread was a page and a half long and you already had it pegged as an "invasion" and called anyone seeing Requirement #3 for what it is "continuing down a rabbit hole of stupidity".

But yeah, nice try, you totes were just trying to be The Nice Guy and mean goons just didn't let you get a word in edgewise!

I wouldn't go so far as to say he came out "loud and clear against screwing organized voters".

Every single CSM response in that thread contained some kind of putdown, except maybe Dovinian's "Hay guyz I'm still kinda drunk," and some of them were nothing but putdowns (every post by Seleene, many posts by Alekseyev Karrde). Basically, the CSM members did everything they could to escalate hostilities and made no real attempt to engage the people affected by this proposal.

The specific proposal is not the problem: it's the requirement for any proposal to disenfranchise the "right" voters.

It was said, time and time and time again that the problem wasn't the proposal, the problem was that "The CSM believes that any new CSM voting system should, at a minimum

[...]

3) Reduce (but not eliminate) the advantages held by highly organized voting blocs."
Remove that minimum requirement, and civil discussions can be had. Otherwise this is just an attack on "highly organized voting blocs" (and we all know who these "highly organized voting blocs" are).

Let me put this a different way:

Highsec candidates have a legitimate gripe that FPTP disadvantages them more than others: because they lack any good way to organize they are highly likely to waste their vote compared to bloc votes, who can use their information advantage to overcome the handicaps FPTP places on their voters. But those flaws are still there and should be corrected as well.

This is because FPTP is a system that essentially mandates tactical voting.

The solution is not to disenfranchise 0.0 voters: they're not doing anything wrong. It's to come up with a system that doesn't suffer from the same problems FPTP does. STV - actual STV, where both overvotes and undervotes are reallocated - does this. So people proposing a move to standard STV are fine: this is a system intended to better represent the public.

"modified" STV, as proposed, is not. It's a transparent attempt to game the system by deliberately favoring one group over another. If STV is implemented and 0.0 still dominates the CSM, that does not mean voting reform has failed. It means that that is what the voters want. Highseccers have convinced themselves that nobody could actually favor 0.0 candidates, and that it's all 0.0 cheating. But that's obviously not true.

The argument that Trebor uses that if we reallocated mittens 10k votes we could have had three candidates is transparently dishonest, because he knows the truth: thousands of those votes didn't come from us. We know that, Trebor knows that, and now you know that. If a 0.0 candidate appeals to people, like The Mittani does, outside his bloc all those votes are being deliberately wasted by this proposal. In other words it penalizes the 0.0 candidates with broad support in favor of those with narrow support that can easily be tracked and moved.

Either the system is designed to be fair: to best reflect the views of the voters, or it isn't. Anytime you want to have a discussion about fair systems, we can have that. Anytime you want to have a discussion about how to best bias the system against 0.0, well, then we get the other thread. That's not a discussion we're willing to grant legitimacy to.

We'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. I'm just not the type of person that treats an idea, on paper, as "a straightforward attack". If this were something being forcefully pushed, it may indeed represent a threat, but everyone should always feel free to put out ideas for discussion, even bad ones.

It was and still is unclear to me exactly how Trebor's proposal invalidates the overvotes at the top, if the person those people voted for actually takes office. That is why I started asking questions, and got buried for not "seeing the obvious" or siding with all those that felt that the proposal would "disenfranchise voters". I get it, everyone expects CSM members to have our minds made up about everything before we ever speak about it publicly, and come ready for battle with ammunition ready. This just wasn't one of those cases where I felt strongly one way or another and needed to know more about this before giving it patent endorsement.

Those that objected to the proposal would have done a better job of gaining support from me by simply saying, this is an unethical system, and here's why, breaking down the mechanics and discussing how it actually disenfranchises voters instead of simply being angry with the fact that it was even proposed in the first place. I think you'll find I'm actually quite reasonable and willing to listen.