CSM Elections: Just Say No To Weighted Voting

Perhaps the saltiest of the defeated candidates in the 12th Council of Stellar Management election is Sullen Decimus. Sullen is an incumbent from CSM 11 who would have not won a seat on the council if CCP had reduced the size of the CSM from 14 seats down to 10 last year. Needless to say, his not winning this year came as no surprise. However, Sullen claims the reason he lost was not lack of support, but due to the single transferrable vote system used in CSM elections. He maintains that CSM should use a different system, the weighted vote.

In a weighted vote system, players would cast their votes for ten candidates, with each vote receiving a value depending on the position of the vote. For example, the candidate at the top of a voter's ballot would receive 10 points, the second candidate 9 points, and so on down the line with the candidate at the bottom receiving 1 point.

Players outside of null security space already claim that the voting system is rigged in favor of the large null sec blocs. Sullen's proposal looks to rig the voting in favor of his coalition, the Imperium. I ran the CSM 11 election using a weighted system, and the results are in the table below.

Candidates on the Goonswarm ballot in blue

Using a weighted system in the election results in three changes to the makeup of CSM 11. Out are Bobmon (Pandemic Legion), Nash Kadavr (Pandemic Legion), and Fafer (Northern Coalition.). A weighted vote system would have replaced the historical winners with Goonswarm Federation's Chiimera and Wyld along with Annexe from Tactical Narcotics Team.

The disparity in favor of the largest null sec alliance/coalition using a weighted vote system vs. the single transferrable vote is even greater than appearances first suggest. In a weighted voting system, the vaunted Goonswarm ballot would have helped elect 9 candidates in the CSM 11 election. In the actual results, only 6 candidates from the Goon ballot won seats. But of those 6 candidates, two candidates, The Judge and Kyle Aparthos, received no trickle down support from the Goon ballot. A third candidate, Xenuria, was so popular that he used less than 50 votes of the trickle down to hit quota. Xenuria actually needed no support from the Goon ballot to win, which is a good thing for Sullen or the candidate from The Bastion would not have won last year either.

So, looking back at the CSM 11 election, the system proposed by Sullen Decimus, a member of The Imperium, would have resulted in the official Goonswarm ballot contributing to the victory of 9 members of the Imperium. Using the single transferrable vote system, the official GSF ballot only contributed to 3 Imperium members winning seats. Perhaps to someone sitting in Delve, such a result seems fair. I'm pretty sure the rest of New Eden would disagree.