Jita Park Speakers Corner

Yes Australia has mandatory voting with a $20 fine for non-voting that actually increases to $150 if you don't pay it before it gets to court (about 4 weeks), no what I was saying and sorry I was not clear is that they have found a problem in preference swapping in the above the line part of the voting paper, the relevant parts for EvEs STV are the voting preferences down the line used by blocks etc.. where giving out a list of preferences can result in the election of people with absolutely minor (in eves case) position 1 votes. For example let us say you, if you got elected with only 0.5% of position one votes but got elected on votes lower down in the ballots. In the Western Australia election they are talking about people voting for the sex party and their votes through back door preference deals being used to elect the motor sports enthusiasts senator.

What it boils down to is election transparency and meeting a minimum number of primary votes to be able to get elected. I hope that is a little clearer.

But I will let you know what occurs with that.

Sorry, been a long day.

Nice one and I admit to watching that one fly so far over my head that I only saw the chemtrail.

m

I am still not sure what you hope to accomplish with this change. You will still have a "Designated CSM Buttmonkey" (previously known as Chairman), and a "Designated Minutes Buttmonkey (previously known as secretary). You can change the name of the positions or you can call them nothing at all, but the responsibility of the positions remain. That which we call a rose, etc, etc.

How does the CSM plan on letting the playerbase know what the new "internal structures" are? Or do you consider public knowledge of the "internal structures" part of the "external ~stuff~" that you claim is "divisive"?

And it's good to see you back from your CSM burnout

Mike - change yo Sig - you're a Niner now

(Off topic)

It's no so much complaints about primary vote, but that most Australian senate elections* allow (and tacitly encourage) a voter to put a single '1' vote for a particular party that results in a preference distribution for the entire ballot (which can be over 100 candidates) based on a submission by that party to the electoral commission before the election.

In theory, the distributions are published & public knowledge.
In practice, almost no-one is willing to got to the electoral commission web site and find out what chain of preferences their particular 'vote above the line' will follow.

Now, there have always been preference deals on 'how to vote' cards ("if you put us in position 3 on your card, we'll do the same for you on ours"). The difference is that the results of such deals are now opaque to the average voter. So you can be surprised to learn that your vote for 'party I agree with who didn't make the cut' turned into a vote for 'party I violently disagree with' rather than 'another party I agree with'.

Getting ansty about "0.5% of the primary vote" issue is simply a lack of understanding of how STV works. It's not about primary votes, but about blocs. A feature of all STV systems is to aggregate votes spread among a candidates in a bloc into votes for the single most preferred candidate from that bloc. And you keep collapsing blocs until the required number of candidates remain (plus 1, who is the last candidate to be eliminated). The real issue, if there is one, is about the blocs themselves being opaque so it's not immediately obvious how your vote cascades.

Or you can do what I do and vote for every candidate individually, so you know exactly how your vote will cascade.


* almost all Australian states plus the national government have two "houses". The population is divided into electorates which each elect a single candidate (via STV) for the "lower house". Then there's an "upper house" to which is elected a number of candidates via multi-candidate STV (exact same system as is used for CSM, except that some don't allow you to stop until you have completely filled the ballot). The national election divides this into state electorates, each of which elect 6 candidates per election. State elections usually have a single electorate for however many candidates.

As such, if you're electing (say) 20 candidates, that means that each candidate needs less than 5% of the vote to be elected (actually N/21 + 1 votes, where N is total number of votes, or about 4.8%). Viewed this way, a 0.5% primary vote is over 10% of a quantum, a not insignificant amount (and everyone else you're competing with has a similar quantity of votes or they'd already have met their own quantum).

Once again, a lot of the furore is proving nothing more than that most people's mathematical intuition is highly misleading.

it actually means that the CSM has recognized that all subsequent chairman have been pretenders to the throne of Chairman for Life, the Space King, The Mittani

A(ny) Union for New Eden Capsuleers should have a Chairperson

The only document one actually needs to remember is the one you're planning to vote for. Or, you can vote manually.

From my perspective, it looks like we put a mechanism in place where voters could substitute trusting their party of choice rather than thinking for themselves. And, unsurprisingly, there's now a call for a whole lot more mechanisms to try to regulate the original shortcut. So rather than delegate to a political party, we're now going to delegate to a political party plus a whole lot of complex and arcane rules created and administered by bureaucrats who are ultimately accountable to the most influential of the political parties. Or we could just do a little work and think for ourselves?

I don't recall claiming that having a law degree or being a community or union organiser conferred immunity to poor statistical thinking.


Let's take a look at this. You have 100 candidates, and are electing 20. In a fully uniform field, each candidate gets 1% of the primary vote. However, it's not uniform. The #1 candidates for the major parties could easily draw 80% of the primary vote, leaving 20% spread among 98 candidates (think the big null-sec blocs in the CSM election, only much more so). This leaves an average of 0.2% among the rest of the candidates. Given that the average is 0.2%, 0.5% is looking pretty good. Eliminate a few of those minor candidates and that 0.5% can swell to the ~5% needed to actually cross the line. (Caveat - numbers are made up, but I'm in good company ;) )

Back to the CSM election, it should have been entirely possible for mynnna to be elected without a single primary vote. Candidates who make their quota are "removed" first, and it's not unreasonable to expect that the vast majority of Sion's surplus vote spilled directly to mynnna.


Basically, people didn't know how it works, still don't know how it works, and let someone else decide what to do with their vote, but are absolutely sure that the process that they didn't pay attention to and didn't want to pay attention to must be broken because it produced an outcome that someone in the media has told them they should not have expected.

Of course, we EvE players are smarter than that, so would never fall into that trap ;)

So still no actual announcement on the forums as to the CSM9 winners and the voting statistics.

Oh well I suppose given the wait time on the minutes in the last year we will get them just before the CSM10 election.

Well I suppose it gives time to pick on the CSM9 'supposed' council members after all no official forum announcement means they are fake councilors.

:)