Jita Park Speakers Corner

I don't think anyone is suggesting that people in, say, a high sec seat only comment on high sec issues. It's the obvious solution to the idea that all major play styles need representing.

The biggest problem with multi round votes is that at the moment we cannot get the majority of EvE to vote once.

But the thing is no ones votes are 'thrown out'. Just because your vote didn't in some way, shape or form go towards electing someone does not mean your vote 'did not count'. You voted for the person you wanted to vote for. That person did not get enough votes to win one of the many positions on the CSM. You aren't being disenfranchised or discounted. Your guy lost.

The problem isn't the system. If in fact people are disheartened because larger or more well organized alliances are always getting CSM positions, the fault lies with the people. You can't make people vote (unless you made it a 'you can't log in or else'). Giving people 3x the votes and a negative vote or letting them vote for candidate A or then B or then C doesn't change the fact that people don't care. It's certainly not going to break up the big power blocs if people are upset by that.

The solution is much like it is in real life politics. You need to energize your base. You need to get to know the people and let them get to know you. You need to SHOW them why the CSM is important. You need to be able to holdup a list of accomplishments and say "THIS is how we have made the game better".

I especially dislike this idea, since it discounts the way the CSM works, and should work. It doesn't need specialists, it needs players with a wide range of experience to keep CCP grounded so they don't pull a CSM5 retardation move and nerf things which don't make sense, for reasons which don't add up, or try to pull another incarna.

Having bias towards a certain aspect (f.ex WHs, LS etc) is fine, but running on a single issue, f.ex POSes, is severely limiting and utterly misrepresenting what the CSM is all about.

But Size, your suggestion doesn't help at all.

1) If people aren't voting because they think their vote doesn't matter against the large blocs, then giving EVERYONE 3 votes for and one against doesn't change anything. Because the large blocs just game the system even more.

2) If people aren't voting because they don't care, giving them more votes isn't going to make them suddenly care, especially when it's just hidden inside a voting game where they pick three and pick one against, only to find the same people for CSM again.

3) if people aren't voting because they aren't aware of what the CSM is or does, then givingthemmore votes isn't going to educate them.

4) if people aren't voting because they think their votes are 'cast away or thrown out' then they have no clue how the voting process works. And giving them extra votes so they can feel like their vote counts, when it most likely again won't, will not help. Eventually, someone is going to use their three votes for three people who lose and their one vote against for someone who still gets in. By your reasoning, their vote doesn't count. People need to realize their vote counts because they are involved in a democratic process, not because their guy won.

My point. You don't need to create alt corps/alliances in order to run a candidate for each seat.

BTW - a voting block is not necessarily a single corp/alliance. There could be a voting block consisting of independent miners, for example, who have decided to back a single candidate who belongs to an NPC corp.


The even distribution in my example was merely to simplify the math. It doesn't matter how a single large block distributes and prioritizes its "for" votes and "against" votes, because the other large blocks are going to be doing the same thing - effectively balancing each other out, which gives the independents a chance - maybe not much of one, but, perceptually, it will exist and perception is important when you are trying to up your voter participation.


Yep, and that is exactly why my proposed system works better than the one person, one vote system.

It still allows a group like the CFC to get one of their candidates elected, which is only fair, but it makes it highly unlikely that any one group could game a majority of the seats.

You also need to consider that a CFC candidate for a null sec seat or a super cap seat would probably run unopposed by the high sec player community. However, it is likely that if the CFC tried to run a candidate for a high sec seat, he/she would pick up a large number of "against" votes from the high sec carebears, just because he/she was a CFC candidate, irregardless of the candidate's actual qualifications. So, it would be more probable that the CFC would concentrate its votes to win the 1 or 2 seats of greatest interest to them, and avoid the ones for which they are likely to be irrationally voted "against".

BTW - in theory, you could still win all 7 seats, if you were able to convince all of the voting blocks to vote "for" your candidate(s), or, at least, not "against" him/her/them. But, this is very unlikely to happen in practice.


Yeah... lol, like that.

No, the 'against" vote is what prevents large blocks from gaming the system.

You should keep in mind that "for" votes, which are not organized, tend to get more evenly distributed among candidates, whereas "against" votes tend to be applied to more specifically, even without organization. This means that the "against" votes of the unorganized majority players will work against any large blocks, attempting to game the system.

I'm sure you can see how this might work in practice, even if no one actively organized a "get rid of (insert your favorite current CSM member here)" campaign.


It isn't that people don't care - the reason people don't vote is because they think their unorganized votes are ineffective vs. the voting blocks - which happens to be true under the one person, one vote system. Currently, the only way to compete against a voting block is to create another voting block, which the majority of people just aren't interested in doing, in game and in RL.

As for ending up with the same people for CSM... as you pointed out, it is likely that the certain CSM members have already picked up enough "against" votes to make it unlikely that they would get elected again, under my proposed system.


Well, I won't argue with that. I suppose that it is up to CCP and/or the CSM to better educate the players about the purpose of the CSM. I'd consider this a separate issue, though, from the actual election process.


The reason you give each player 3 "for" votes and only 1 "against" vote, rather than 1 "for" vote and 1 "against" vote, is because this eliminates the perception that any other single player can negate all of your votes, by voting "for" the guy you voted "against" and "against" the guy you voted "for". You would still have the 2 other "for" votes, which cannot be negated by the other player.

Ofc, he/she can effectively cancel out your vote by voting for opposing candidates, for the other two seats, but the likelihood of the same player choosing to vote on the same 3 seats out of 7 seats, and to vote exactly contrary to you, is perceptually lower than in either the single "for" vote system, or the 1 "for" vote and 1 "against" vote system.

As for the democratic process and "no clue how the voting process works", I think that you are confusing theory with practice.

In theory, everyone should be educated as to the issues, the qualifications of the candidates, and should be required, by law, to vote. There should be no politicking - no smear campaigns, no promises made to garner votes or funding, no hyperbole, etc. Just the facts, as confirmed by a non-partisan, objective and disinterested third-party.

But, this isn't how it works in practice. No one is required to learn about the issues or the candidates, and no one is required to vote. People vote Republican or Democrat, just because their parents did so, irregardless of the qualifications of the candidates. So-called political analysts are morons - picked because they look good on camera, or know how to play to the worse fears of their audience - it is all about ratings and money. Politicking is everything - the real people and the real issues are lost in the noise.

Quite simply, the system is a mess - many people do realize this and choose to show their lack of support by not voting.

But, please don't take my word for it. Just go out and talk to anyone who isn't planning to vote in the US Presidential elections. You'll hear pretty much the same thing.

It is much worse when the upcoming feature under discussion happens to be POSes, and no one on the CSM has any first hand experience with running one.

I'm obviously not saying this is currently the case (since Hans says he has operated his own POS), but under the current election system, it is very possible for this situation to arise.

It simply makes more sense to ensure that at least one member of the CSM has experience with any specific feature change that CCP is planning to address in an upcoming release.

And, worrying about "specialists" ruining the CSM is absurd. Just about anyone who has played the game long enough to become a specialist is likely to be familiar with many other aspects of the game, as well as the game at large.

Just a few observations.


While increasing the requirements modestly isn't a bad thing, putting a hard limit on the number of candidates on the ballot (as some have suggested) will be trivially gamed. Who needs to stuff the ballot box when you can just stuff the ballot itself?

For this reason, I would simply modestly tighten the current system that by requiring both a modest registration fee (a few PLEX) and obtaining some number of unique posts in the candidate's nomination thread. If you post in the thread, you are endorsing the candidate; only your earliest post in any nomination thread counts, so each account gets a single endorsement. CSM already has similar scripts to handle this kind of thing that we use on crowdsourcing efforts.

This is still trivially gameable but at least it requires a little more effort. And it still doesn't solve the fundamental problem (see below).


Something to keep in mind is that while the elections themselves are good dirty political fun, the actual work of the CSM is rarely political; we act mostly as an (allegedly) expert focus group and (to varying degrees) ombudsmen, not as the political masters of some Department of Pod-pilot Affairs.

As such, the "fair representation" goal should, IMHO, be a "fair representation of the different player subpopulations", which is not quite the same thing as a "fair representation of the electorate" in RL democratic terms. Ideally, CCP would like to have a CSM diverse enough in terms of interests such that no matter what topic is placed before the CSM, there will be at least 3-4 active CSM members with experience in that area.

This would not be so much of an issue if everyone who gets elected to CSM was able to put in the hours needed to do the job properly. The sad fact, however, is that being an active CSM is always time-consuming, sometimes tedious, and often a thankless task, and RL inevitably gets in the way. The end result is that in every CSM, 75+% of the work gets done by 5 or 6 members.

Raising the percentage of active members and increasing the number of active members that have a good grasp of any particular game area are important goals of election reform. In particular, there is a pool of knowledgeable, hard-working potential candidates who are discouraged from running because (for example) they feel they'd just act as a spoiler. It is these candidates that I personally would like to see encouraged to run by a system that permitted some of them to bubble up into the lower slots in the council, where they will have the opportunity to prove their worth. Guys like Two step and Hans are good examples of this process in action; we need more of them.

Whatever some of you may think about the system I described in the other thread, when you compare it in practice with the current system, the differences in outcome would be largely concentrated in the lower positions.


I am sure we would all be very interested if you would describe the methodology, rather than just blithely state that there is one, since if you are correct, then full STV (which seems to be popular with your comrades) would be even more exploitable. It will be interesting to see if it would produce better/more reliable results than what is possible under the current system when you have the advantage of reasonably accurate vote management.

The deal with "limiting the number of candidates" is that someone would have to spend some time and effort on removing such things as gimmick accounts etc. Maybe someone at, say, CCP?