Also why did the election got moved to the later date. According to this dev blog: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=3386 CSM8 should take office April 3rd 2013.

So wormholers will have a primary after all.

The summit attendees will use a new 2+5 system, with CCP and the CSM working together to pick the 5 hardest working and most feature relevant CSMs being flown to each summit and the final 2 attendees will be the "most preferred" candidates, chosen by reentering the election results into an STV election to select the top 2 candidates.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that a Schulze-STV election with 14 seats and 28 candidates would take over 9 years to compute on a decent PC.

Will there be increased efforts to raise awareness of the CSM season this time, which in many people's eyes would be a far more important step for the CSM, and do a far better job of making the process legitimate, than fiddling with the voting system? Asking us to vote twice and to make 14 choices on the second occasion isn't exactly going to appeal to the apathetic Joe Random Eve Player.

Is it 14 votes exactly, or up to 14? If I only see 4 candidates I like the look of, do I have to cast the remaining 10 or can they be discarded?

Is it 14 votes exactly, or up to 14? If I only see 4 candidates I like the look of, do I have to cast the remaining 10 or can they be discarded?

The 'most feature relevant' part of the summit attendee section bothers me somewhat, since the summits should be covering a wide spectrum of topics, not just "lets talk about our new lowsec (for example) revamp expansion for three days". How will this be decided?

As mentioned in the devblog, CCP has not settled on the exact STV counting method to be used in the election. This is basically a tradeoff between systems that are simple and ones that are more complex but generate slightly better proportional results.

In all cases, the actual casting of ballots is the same -- you specify one or more candidates, in your order of preference. It's just the counting method (and the reallocation of votes as candidates are elected and eliminated) that changes.

One system that isn't feasible is Schulze-STV. While it is a very good counting method, its computational complexity explodes as the number of candidates and seats goes up. A back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that a Schulze-STV election with 14 seats and 28 candidates would take over 9 years to compute on a decent PC.

The following links may be useful to those who are interested in suggesting counting systems:

* Wikipedia: Single Transferable Vote
* Wikipedia: Counting single transferable votes
* OpenSTV (Software)

I was trying to look it up and having no luck. What is the Big O notation you got for that algorithm?

I'm probably misunderstanding this, because I'm a little dopey.

Will you have to stack rank all 14 candidates? That seems somewhat onerous, wouldn't be better to say you can select up to 14 people who may ore may not get your vote. Making the voting system harder work seems counter intuitive.