So in the last CSM election 59,109 Accounts voted and only 34238 accounts were counted towards the candidates with 14813 voters Disfranchised.

Isn't this what voting is about: winners and losers?

It's an election, it's a confrontation between candidates - some will win and some will lose. Any system you create where everyone is a winner is going to be absurd.

If the CSM want every vote to carry weight maybe they should run referenda?

Oh good to see we are up to the disenfranchising catch phrase.

Well this thread is just another super whine maybe it needs moving to GD to go with the rest.

But any way here is what I propose for future elections

1. 1 Vote per account
2. Candidates may select 1 candidate to receive their votes if they are knocked out using the lowest number of votes as a starting point and working up
3. Only the votes received by a candidate may be passed on if elimination occurs.
4. A fee of 2 Billion is is required for registration as a candidate
5. Voting buttons as Per Poetic Stanziel suggested "One avenue for the CSM: maybe trying to convince CCP to make voting an in-client component. Perhaps at login, an account is immediately presented with a modal window that describes the CSM and the voting process, and presents three buttons: "I wish to vote now", "I wish to abstain", "I will vote later." Until the account has voted or abstained, they are presented with this window every time they login to the client. If they wish to vote, they are presented with a list of the candidates, each with a short candidate-written summary of their platform."
6. Advertising in splash banners should start ASAP telling people what the CSM is and what it does.
7. Update the "What is the CSM" page.
8. In the case of disqualification, those people who voted for the candidate are subject to there votes disappearing down a black hole.
9. Dev blogs like the winter expansion should have by lines acknowledging the work of the CSM.
10. The CSM should continue it's wonderful transparency and communication with the playerbase.

These changes will effective make the number of votes required for lowest seats higher.
They will also lessen the chance of joke candidates, as these people are supposed to be knowledgeable in the game and if they can not come up with a measly 2 Billion isk then they probably do not know how to play the game well enough.
It will increase voter participation lessening the effect of minorities
It will increase the CSMs profile within the player community.

These are my suggestions but at the end of the day it is the CSMs job to decide for them selves what system they want to put into place. This is one of the tings they were voted in to do.

Good luck and thank you for your hard work.

you game this by sending in so many reps that they all will be knocked up but instead of splitting the votes over 3 guys the others could orginize this so that 5 or more got through. also a fee to run is absalutely a bad idea as hi sec candidates may not have this thus again it all being dominated by people such as goons

Oh good to see we are up to the disenfranchising catch phrase.

So


So in the last CSM election 59,109 Accounts voted and only 34238 accounts were counted towards the candidates with 14813 voters Disfranchised.

Yeah so the voting system you so want to keep because it is good for your minority while 24% of the voters where disfranchised in the last election.

But Goonswarm and Test member complain because things might be set to a fashion that is not so much in the way of their favour.

CSM7 may be many things, but skilled in political scheming they are not.

No disrespect intended, but, mittens, good at politics?

Any half decent 'politican' would not have thrown away some 10,000 votes.

Name em?

Sadly the Irish political voting system is based on STV

what it results in is more n more clowns getting in to government because of STV and look at the state of the irish economy :(.

STV sucks

in eve STV would just see more n more clowns getting into CSM.

As opposed to the current... oh nevermind...

There are a number of off the shelf STV programs available and a number of organisations which will happily conduct genuine STV elections, the Australian Electoral Commission and the Electoral Reform Society in the UK are 2 examples. Rather than re-inventing the wheel, with the cool new feature of being square instead of round, can I suggest that the solution is to buy an off the shelf program or use an organisation.

Over the past few CSM elections, it has become increasingly clear that the simple "vote for one candidate" election system should be revisited in the hopes of finding a system that produces a CSM that better represents the electorate (ie: those members of the community who care enough to vote).

In the most recent election, for example, almost 25% of the votes were cast for candidates who did not win election to the CSM. These lost "undervotes", coupled with the fact that some candidates have increasingly overwhelming information and organizational advantages, threatens to effectively disenfranchise a significant portion of the electorate.

Since it is in everyone's long-term interest for the CSM to broadly represent the electorate, a strong case can be made that the election system should be reformed. CSM elections should not only be fair, but should be seen to be fair.

This posting is the first step in that process, and it is our hope that it will spark a serious discussion of the topic and provide the CSM with community guidance as we solidify our recommendations to CCP.

Goals of a Reformed System

It has been mathematically proven that there is no perfect voting system. However, "The perfect is the enemy of the good", and there are many election systems that are clearly better than the current one.

The CSM believes that any new CSM voting system should, at a minimum:

1) Be easy to implement (by CCP), use (by the voters) and permit public verification of the results given the published raw vote totals.

2) Reduce the need for tactical voting ("I like A better than B, but I have to vote for B because I think she's more electable"). This is typically done by reallocating votes cast for candidates that are eliminated from the election to other candidates, thus reducing or eliminating undervotes.

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.

Below we present one possible system that attempts to meet the above goals. We caution readers not to assume that this is a system we have decided upon; rather, it is presented as an example for discussion and improvement.

Candidate-Designated Single Transferrable Vote

The most common "better" election system is Single Transferrable Vote (STV). Typically in STV systems, voters rank the candidates (or some subset of them) in order of preference, and if their first candidate is eliminated from the election, their vote transfers to their second choice, and so on.

However, standard STV systems do not meet our first goal. Implementing classic STV would require significant work by CCP to update the system, would require extra effort by voters (which would tend to favor highly organized groups), and may not be publicly verifiable.

Therefore, perhaps a simpler system might achieve most of our goals. Consider, for example, Candidate-Designated Single Transferrable Vote.

In this system, voters vote for a single candidate, just as they do now. However, each candidate publicly states which other candidates they want their votes to be transferred to if they are eliminated from the election.

CD-STV, while not providing the full spectrum of choice that STV does, does meet all the goals. The amount of work CCP will have to do to implement it is small (listing the candidates' preferences on their profile and voting page), it is no more difficult to use than at present, and anyone can run the raw vote totals through an election simulator.

The Nitty-Gritty:

Currently, once the final list of approved candidates is published by CSM, there is a 2 week campaign period before voting starts. In the new system, candidates will have to disclose to CCP and publish in the first post of their campaign thread and on any campaign websites who their preferred alternate candidates are before the end of the first week. After that, they are locked in and cannot be changed -- thus there will be a week for voters to comment on these choices and decide how best to allocate their votes (troll and feeder candidates will be fairly obvious).

Candidates should specify somewhere between 3 and 6 alternates in order of their preference (their "preferences"), so that if one or more of their preferred candidates has already been elected or knocked out, their votes will not be wasted.

On the actual voting page, there would be a list of the alternate candidates so that when actually voting, people will know where their vote will go.

The determination of the results is straightforward:

In each round:

* If the top vote-getter has more than 1/n of the remaining vote pool, where n is the number of CSM slots still available (14 at the start), she is directly elected; the vote pool is reduced by the number of votes she currently controls (and n goes down by 1 in the next round)

* If this does not happen, then the bottom candidate is eliminated, and her votes are reallocated to the topmost candidate in her preference list that is still in the race.

This process continues until everyone has either been elected or eliminated, at which point we have our rankings.

As opposed to the current... oh nevermind...

The real reason that this stupid trainwreck of a thread even came up is because highsec is so smothered in cotton wool and bubble-wrap that the bulk of the residents there have no reason to lift a finger to improve their place in-game, and so aren't motivated to vote, let alone organise to determine the most effective candidate to articulate their non-existent concerns.

Highsec, deep down, knows how good they have it compared to the rest of the game, and so the only real 'platform' that its' occupants could rally around would be "CCP, please leave everything exactly the same as it is now forever and ever".

The real reason that this stupid trainwreck of a thread even came up is because highsec is so smothered in cotton wool and bubble-wrap that the bulk of the residents there have no reason to lift a finger to improve their place in-game, and so aren't motivated to vote, let alone organise to determine the most effective candidate to articulate their non-existent concerns.

Highsec, deep down, knows how good they have it compared to the rest of the game, and so the only real 'platform' that its' occupants could rally around would be "CCP, please leave everything exactly the same as it is now forever and ever".

What I would like to see is CCP send out a survey as they do anyway, asking people what their opinion of the CSM is, if they vote and there reasons why do / do not

Here is an idea, how about you concrete on finding out why the what, 85% is it, of the Eve population who actually doesn't give a flying **** about the CSM and don't vote, why they don't.

Once you accomplish this and maybe say half that figure then the issue of block voting will most likely become much less of an issue as many more eve players who are not part of those coalitions will be voting.

I say this knowing that the CSM will most likely never tackle this problem head on as it would mean they would find it much more difficult to be re-elected which after all is what this is all about.

It has nothing to do with making the voting system fairer or helping the "disenfranchise voter". It is simply a way to further help to ensure that certain CSM members get re-elected so they continue on their little power trips and feel more important then everyone else.

Whilst I am not a goon and have no particular feelings towards kittens, I have to admit that when he was chairman of the CSM they certainly appeared to accomplish a lot more then any other CSM and there was a lot more game issues discussed then pointless threads like this one.

As I said before, instead of trying to pass this off as a discussion on making the voting system fairer, trying finding out why approx 85% of Eve players don't vote and get that number down.

Once you have accomplished this then take another look at the voting system and see if it needs changing.