The year of the incumbent: In 2018, seven of the ten members of CSM 12 chose to run for re-election. All seven won. Here is a list.
Steve Ronuken (5th term)
Sort Dragon (4th term)
Aryth (3rd term)
Innominate (3rd term)
Jin'taan (3rd term)
The Judge (3rd term)
Suitonia (2nd term)
The Imperium Gets Half: A lot of people are freaking out about the fact
that The Imperium managed to place five candidates on the CSM. Although the
single-transferrable vote system used in the CSM voting favors the large null
sec alliances by making sure they don't "waste" any votes, a lot of
other factors contributed to the election result. But the domination does lend
a handy hook on which to hang all the other themes of the election.
The power of the GSF ballot: The official ballot put out
by Goonswarm Federation is the single most powerful force in CSM voting, and
the 2018 election continued the trend. The turnout I was able to track in the
voting file rose from 4273 ballots cast that contained some combination of the
original six candidate slate in 2017 to 6564 ballots that had some combination
of the 10 official candidates in 2018. To put the number into perspective, the
official Imperium ballot made up 22.6% of all ballots cast in the CSM 13
election. Contrast that with the 22.3% of all ballots that mentioned Guardians
of the Galaxy leader Sort Dragon, who won his fourth term this year.
The growth of the Imperium's share of the vote
total was greatly enhanced by the coalition's growth as seen in its largest
organization, Goonswarm Federation. In January 2017, two months before voting
for CSM 12 began, GSF had approximately 21,000 members. When I looked at the
beginning of June 2018, the number had swelled to 30,800. Still, the growth of turnout for the official ballot did increase faster than the size of the coalition.
The Creecher Effect: Even with a dominant share of ballots cast,
Goonswarm Federation and The Imperium as a whole should only have won 3 seats
at most. So, what explains the other two wins? The first involved the
controversy and ultimate removal of Creecher Viprio from the ballot during the
voting period.
Creecher, the capital director of Test Alliance
Please Ignore, is a vociferous proponent of shield-tanked supercapital-class
ships. Members of Pandemic Legion, an alliance heavily invested in armor-tanked
supercapitals, moved to block Creecher's almost assured spot on the CSM, from
which he could argue for improvements in shield capital and supercapital ships.
So members of Pandemic Legion did a little digging and found logs on Pastebin
showing Creecher using racial epithats in a private chat in-game, a violation
of EVE Online's EULA and Terms of Service. Since the conversation occurred
using CCP's communication channels, CCP could verify that the logs were not
doctored and Creecher was removed from the voting.
As the STV system used in the election is a form
of ranked voting, the computer algorithm used to tally the votes just ignored
Creecher's votes and produced a list of the winners. The released voting files
show that Creecher would have won a spot on the CSM. The candidate who
benefited from Creecher's disqualification was The Judge, thus making four
members from Goonswarm Federation on CSM 13.
The Ringer: The official Imperium ballot usually looks more
impactful than it actually is with the inclusion of extremely strong candidates
in the fourth and fifth slots. This year's candidate came out of one of The
Imperium's smaller member alliances, The Initiative.. Brisc Rubal, a real-life
politician from Virginia who works as a lobbyist on Capitol Hill for a maritime
union, threw his hat into the CSM ring and treated the election like the real
thing, including a slick, meme-filled advertisement. When the votes were
counted, Brisc had 1990 first place ballots at the start of round 1 of the
simulation. While not meeting the quota at the time, Brisc's vote total
guaranteed victory as the 11th place candidate, Tikktock Tocktikk, only
received 1661 votes when he was eliminated in the final round.
Vote buying: Rumor at Fanfest held that The Judge was
attempting to buy his way onto CSM 13 by paying skill point farmers to vote for
him. The rumors continued up through the end of the election, as a story
emerged of The Judge buying approximately 550 votes. Did people have proof that
The Judge bought votes? I don't believe so. And the vote total was suspiciously
near the total required to knock The Judge into 11th place and award the final
seat to Tikktock Tocktikk by 8 votes. However, even if The Judge did purchase
that many votes, the rules allowed it.
A very settled election: Unlike last year when Yukiko Kamo skated at or
below 10th place in every round, this year's election was basically settled
after the first round. At the beginning of round 1, four candidates: Aryth,
Sort Dragon, Jin'taan, and Brisc Rubal, had more votes than Tikktock Tocktikk
would up with at elimination, thus securing the victory. Three other
candidates, Merkelchen, Innominate, and Killah Bee, had guarenteed victory at
the end of round one. The other three eventual winners, Suitonia, Steve
Ronuken, and The Judge, rounded out the top 10 at the end of round one.
The lack of major voting slates: Apart from The Imperium,
the only other major power that seemed to exert any effort to electing people
was Guardians of the Galaxy. Due to their preferred candidate not making it to
the final ballot, Pandemic Horde wound up voting for the GotG ticket of Sort
Dragon and Killah Bee. Voters placed Sort Dragon and Killah Bee at the top of their ballots 1546 times, with the order reversed an additional 110 times. In contrast, the slate of Northern Coalition. of Killah Bee, Malakai Asamov, Sort Dragon, and Winter duFallen only appears 467 times. That's right, the final trickle that Killah Bee received from Sort Dragon of 1320 votes was nearly three times the support he received from his own coalition's official ballot.
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