Voting has commenced!

[gravypod]

In many STV systems, if a voter does not use all slots on his ranking, and all of his previous selections are ruled out because of the lack of votes, only THEN their vote is eleminated form the election altogether. But I guess the array-size is fixed here.

STV is also meant to be used in a parallel system. It is best used to choose candidates, not leaders. That is why it was never adopted in NZ. I'd be happier with an MMP system, it works the best from what I have seen.

 

[Bench]

As we've said previously, this is the first one and as such in hindsight we may find things would work a better way for future elections, but we have to start somewhere and we have felt that this was the best way for us to conduct the whole election process. Yes you have to use all 5 preferences, we have 7 seats and if everyone wanted say the same 3 people then we're left with 4 empty spots. Fact is, even if you only have two people you really like for the council, the ballot is set and the seats are set so no matter what you do 5 additional names on that list are going to be going onto that council, so you might as well take a few moments, read some of the applications, and weigh in.

 

[Megacrafter127]

NZ

NZ?

 

[gravypod]

NZ?

New Zealand when they did their voting reform.

 

[Master_Artificer]

You choose 5 candidates. You rank them from 1 to 5. The person with the most "1"s wins. This way, if your first choice doesn't get elected one of your other selections should.

Wait, when I read it, I thought the 5 was the person you wanted the most... I thought it was what you said at first, but then reading it seemed to make it flip flop.. now I am confused. Dangit rimmer, you might have gotten my 1 vote.

gravypod the point is that i may not want to vote for more than 3 ... and not randomly support two who i may not want to see in the council at all.

When in doubt, vote for gravy. Gravy goes good on everything.

 

[gravypod]

Wait, when I read it, I thought the 5 was the person you wanted the most... I thought it was what you said at first, but then reading it seemed to make it flip flop.. now I am confused. Dangit rimmer, you might have gotten my 1 vote.



When in doubt, vote for gravy. Gravy goes good on everything.

Hehehe, thanks!

 

[yelby]

 

[kiddan]

Good luck everyone! May the most useful man(or woman) win!

And man, voting for 5 people was hard

 

[Comr4de]

I would like to point out that I withdrew from the election. A few people might notice I am not on the ballot so it's only fair I let you all know that's not a mistake. You can find out more on my Q&A thread here. http://starmadedock.net/threads/ask-and-i-shall-answer-criss-q-a.6909/

Oh dear, hope it all goes well!

 

[Lecic]

A thing worth consideration for future voting and one I am sure was already suggested at least once on other occasion by someone else - make sure that the applications/applicant nicknames on the voting page have links to profiles and (preferably extended) post history.

You can see someone's post history on their profile page.

STV is also meant to be used in a parallel system. It is best used to choose candidates, not leaders. That is why it was never adopted in NZ. I'd be happier with an MMP system, it works the best from what I have seen.

We aren't choosing a single leader, though. We're selecting a council of 7. This system is more fair for multiple seats, is it not?

 

[gravypod]

We aren't choosing a single leader, though. We're selecting a council of 7. This system is more fair for multiple seats, is it not?

Depends, but if you only have 1 to 4 candidates in mind, you are forced to vote for another. If your top 4 meet the minimum, you are wasting your vote on someone who you might now like.

 

[Bench]

Yes but gravypod even if you have your big 4 you like, the council has 7 seats, so even if you don't like any of the other applicants, 3 more of them will be going to the council regardless of your feelings towards them. So you might as well use your 5th preference on the person you least don't like because someone's going to end up on there.

Anyway no sense arguing over what it should be while we're in the middle of it, it won't change at least until when the next election is going to happen.

The best of luck to all applicants!

And for those who are confused you order the 5 preferences in order of preference, so 1 is your first preference, 2 is your second preference all the way to 5 is your 5th preference.

 

[EtherEel]

Simple question: Why was the community not consulted regarding the voting procedure?

At the very least you could have gotten feedback, a general feel, as to what we -- the voters, the reason for having voting procedures -- would prefer. We didn't even know when the voting was slated to start. Now it's just "this is what The Great WE have decided, live with it."

Americans will find these voting mechanics weird and convoluted. We, generally, prefer simple and straight-forward.

For future consideration, I would suggest a simple method that we do in the States when there is a plurality of seats and a potentially large field of candidates. In such cases you will be instructed as follows: Vote for up to, but not more than 5 candidates. Simple, efficient, you get what you want. If you only want to vote for 1 candidate, you may do so. All votes count equally. Those 5 candidates with the most ("raw") votes win. Ties rarely happen, but would just to a "run-off" between the tied candidates.

~ee

 

[CyberTao]

Simple question: Why was the community not consulted regarding the voting procedure?

It more or less was though. Duke has been in chat a few times and talked about how voting would work, and everyone was for it once they knew what it meant. The single 'problem' is when people dont want to use up all votes, which was honestly done like that because Duke would know would want something like that.

Basically; imagine if the entirity of Mushroom Fleet only used 1 vote each, suddenly there is a huge in imbalance in the votes because of popularity. It removes the problem of popularity, because you can not just vote for your favourite youtuber, you have to vote for others as well. This was actually a major concern among chat goers, there are 3 (to my knowledge) major MF youtubers running, a server with a very large following and one that could probably easily get the majority of votes if people could just drop their extra votes.

I'm not trying to pick a fight with MF here, but it's the best example of the fear of popularity that the forums seemed to have. Duke countered that, he put a lot of work and thought into the system, it's like that for a reason, not because the royal "we" said so.

 

[SkylordLuke]

Simple question: Why was the community not consulted regarding the voting procedure?

At the very least you could have gotten feedback, a general feel, as to what we -- the voters, the reason for having voting procedures -- would prefer. We didn't even know when the voting was slated to start. Now it's just "this is what The Great WE have decided, live with it."

Americans will find these voting mechanics weird and convoluted. We, generally, prefer simple and straight-forward.

For future consideration, I would suggest a simple method that we do in the States when there is a plurality of seats and a potentially large field of candidates. In such cases you will be instructed as follows: Vote for up to, but not more than 5 candidates. Simple, efficient, you get what you want. If you only want to vote for 1 candidate, you may do so. All votes count equally. Those 5 candidates with the most ("raw") votes win. Ties rarely happen, but would just to a "run-off" between the tied candidates.

~ee

so the huge majority of the world should bow down to the american way? why not the other way? :P eh
this way of voting is great,i think the problem here is that most of the people here dont know how this actualy works. i see a lot of confusion in the comments

 

[Bench]

It more or less was though. Duke has been in chat a few times and talked about how voting would work, and everyone was for it once they knew what it meant. The single 'problem' is when people dont want to use up all votes, which was honestly done like that because Duke would know would want something like that.

Basically; imagine if the entirity of Mushroom Fleet only used 1 vote each, suddenly there is a huge in imbalance in the votes because of popularity. It removes the problem of popularity, because you can not just vote for your favourite youtuber, you have to vote for others as well. This was actually a major concern among chat goers, there are 3 (to my knowledge) major MF youtubers running, a server with a very large following and one that could probably easily get the majority of votes if people could just drop their extra votes.

I'm not trying to pick a fight with MF here, but it's the best example of the fear of popularity that the forums seemed to have. Duke countered that, he put a lot of work and thought into the system, it's like that for a reason, not because the royal "we" said so.

^this. Duke mentioned it would be STV when the applications were released to the public so it's not like it was just sprung on everyone. I don't know how it's done in the States, all I've drawn from is my own voting experiences here in Australia. And here we have a list of all the candidates and we number 1 through to whatever on order of preference, so number 1 is our highest preference and it goes down from there. You have to use them all up and no doubles, can't leave any blank. Voting is mandatory so with that combination they get the highest dataset from conducting the voting that way. Now with 49 applicants we didn't want that so we culled down the required number to just under the number of seats available in the council.

 

[gravypod]

Yes but gravypod even if you have your big 4 you like, the council has 7 seats, so even if you don't like any of the other applicants, 3 more of them will be going to the council regardless of your feelings towards them. So you might as well use your 5th preference on the person you least don't like because someone's going to end up on there.

Anyway no sense arguing over what it should be while we're in the middle of it, it won't change at least until when the next election is going to happen.

The best of luck to all applicants!

And for those who are confused you order the 5 preferences in order of preference, so 1 is your first preference, 2 is your second preference all the way to 5 is your 5th preference.

7 seats with 5 selections makes for a complete incorrect implementation of STV.

But, I am not crazy enough to think that things will change for this election. Don't worry, I'm just starting up the nag-engine for the next one. I understand that change happens very slow here,

 

[Bench]

7 seats with 5 selections makes for a complete incorrect implementation of STV.

But, I am not crazy enough to think that things will change for this election. Don't worry, I'm just starting up the nag-engine for the next one. I understand that change happens very slow here,

Just mention it again once whoever is elected settles into the council roles, by then we'll have started on assessing how it all went and what to change.

 

[EtherEel]

chat

Chat is not the community. It's a part of the community.
A forum discussion with "on the record" opinions/suggestions reaches deeper into and is more accessible to the entire community.

Your (all of your) hypothetical worries regarding a single large voting "block" are just that -- hypothetical worries. MF can still, in the current mechanic, sweep the top 3 spots -- but there are more seats left... My suggested method deals with the problem just as easily, but is plainly "intuitive." If a pattern of voter "block" consistently produces council dominance, then you must either concede that this actually does represent the community or question the validity of existence of the council.

so the huge majority of the world should bow down to the american way? why not the other way? :p eh
this way of voting is great,i think the problem here is that most of the people here dont know how this actualy works. i see a lot of confusion in the comments

I'll remind the "Skylord" that the huge majority of players are Americans. (The "world" needs to let go of it's irrational Fear of America complex.)
The confusion stems from the fact that "Americans will find these voting mechanics weird and convoluted. etc..."

Duke mentioned it would be STV when the applications were released to the public so it's not like it was just sprung on everyone

While this is true, still Americans have no idea what that means (and we're not all going to rush over to wikipedia to figure it out, especially when it was also stated that so many variables were yet to be determined.)

[I'm a slow-typer, so this is taking me a long time to get to all these...]

Conclusion: 1. Remember who the constituents are (mostly Americans).
2. See above suggested method of plurality election mechanic.

~ee

 

[SkylordLuke]

Chat is not the community. It's a part of the community.
A forum discussion with "on the record" opinions/suggestions reaches deeper into and is more accessible to the entire community.

Your (all of your) hypothetical worries regarding a single large voting "block" are just that -- hypothetical worries. MF can still, in the current mechanic, sweep the top 3 spots -- but there are more seats left... My suggested method deals with the problem just as easily, but is plainly "intuitive." If a pattern of voter "block" consistently produces council dominance, then you must either concede that this actually does represent the community or question the validity of existence of the council.

I'll remind the "Skylord" that the huge majority of players are Americans. (The "world" needs to let go of it's irrational Fear of America complex.)
The confusion stems from the fact that "Americans will find these voting mechanics weird and convoluted. etc..."

While this is true, still Americans have no idea what that means (and we're not all going to rush over to wikipedia to figure it out, especially when it was also stated that so many variables were yet to be determined.)

[I'm a slow-typer, so this is taking me a long time to get to all these...]

Conclusion: 1. Remember who the constituents are (mostly Americans).
2. See above suggested method of plurality election mechanic.

~ee

Lets not rush ahead. If i remember,this term is going to last only 3 months. we will see how things work,what need to be fixed,how the whole communication between the council members and community works,etc.
after this "trial" term,Im sure guys will find something easy for everyone to learn next time.