I just wanted to state, for the record, that I could give no ****'s whether a Goon is elected to a future CSM. They represent a large portion of the active, involved player base, and most people would agree that if they can muster the most votes for a candidate, they deserve to be on the council.

Despite the hilarity of the Goons instantly invading the thread assuming that this is all somehow directed at them, that doesn't change the fact that players have been, for many elections now, frustrated with the electoral process and expressed desire to iterate upon it.

If you note the title of the thread, it is a call for discussion. You know, where you bring ideas and share them and discuss their merits. I hope we can all keep this in mind before we continue down the rabbit hole of stupidity that is either "You just want to suppress Goon influence" or "you just want to make sure you all get re-elected".

3) Reduce (but not eliminate) the advantages held by highly organized voting blocs. In the previous election, for example, one voting bloc did extremely sophisticated exit-polling; if they had chosen to use this information to efficiently split their votes, they could have won 3 of the top 7 positions on the CSM.

That said, I wholeheartedly support election reform as the opportunity for large blocs to "lock down" CSM seats is an issue that is only growing more obvious with time. If left unchecked, this will become increasingly destructive to the integrity and legitimacy of the Council as the CSM grows in influence and relevance.

This is just one proposal, out of a hundred ways to approach this, and everyone is certainly welcome to disagree about whether or not it is an improvement over traditional STV systems. Trebor's approach stems from his interest in keeping things simple.

Assuming for a moment that any large entity was capable of and succeeded in achieving 3/14 seats on CSM. This is over 20% of council representation. I think most players can understand that there might be something unfair about any group that holds less than 20% of the player population covering 20% of the council. Does anyone see any reason for that discrepancy to exist, or have an explanation as to how that discrepancy benefits the players?

As for myself being for or against this particular proposal? That depends on what I learn from the public discussion in this thread.

Discussion about electoral reform has been kicked around for much longer than a few months, this is hardly some new, strange obsession of CSM7's. Players have been talking about this for years, and will very likely continue until we actually see electoral reform.

Run the election like true STV, but people pick a candidate and that candiate's list becomes their STV vote. It would also be nice to support people picking their own STV vote list, but that would take more dev time on CCP's part.

stuff

1. CSM seats are allocated to specific areas and issues in the game. One seat each is allocated to high-sec, low-sec, null-sec and WH space. Three seats are allocated to the highest-priority issues which CCP plans to deal with in the upcoming releases - this might be a POS issues seat, a frigate rebalancing seat, etc. CCP can opt to add more issue-specific CSM seats, as they choose.

Just like when elected representatives move area boundaries, they are the elected representatives they need to knuckle down and make the call.

every single csm member, even the most useless and most virulently opposed to goonswarm, have admitted that no goonswarm member who has been elected to the csm has ever done this, and have repeatedly championed issues that would help the game but hurt goonswar,