CSM8 Election Statistics

The elections for the 8th Council of Stellar Management (CSM8) are now all wrapped up and CSM8 is already in action reviewing providing feedback on many of the features coming in Odyssey.

With the changes in this years election system to using the Wright Single Transferable Vote (Wright-STV), we at CCP thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the important statistics regarding voter behavior and how ballots were counted. In the new voting system, voters were able to fill out up to 14 slots of their ballot, or "vector", in order of preference. The ballot if then processed by the Wright-STV code to ensure that it is optimally used to elect candidates in the voters order of preference without wasting the vote on those who can't use it or who do not need it, until there are no more candidates on their ballot (this is reffered to as exhaustion of a ballot). The percentage of the ballot exhausted to elect candidates is equivalent to the ballots "strength" in the election in comparison to other ballots.

First up, we looked at the length of the ballot and examined how much value got exhausted per length

Graphs of the last two columns:

We also found it interesting to look at which slots on the ballots were used to elect candidates: This shows on average, how powerful each preference slot from 1-14 on each ballot was at electing a candidate to the council.

Here are some interesting high-popularity ballot orders and how they got applied. These are what many would refer to as "bloc votes". We bolded the bits that we found interesting.

3964 votes followed this vector:

['mynnna', 'Kesper North', 'Kaleb Rysode', 'Sort Dragon', 'Sala Cameron', 'Banlish', 'Artctura', 'Malcanis', 'Unforgiven Storm', 'Awol Aurix', 'DaeHan Minhyok', 'Mangala Solaris', 'Psychotic Monk', 'James Arget']

43.65% of your ballot expended to elect mynnna

39.48% of your ballot expended to elect Kesper North

Kaleb Rysode was eliminated in round 3 with 610 votes

Sort Dragon was elected before your vote got here

15.87% of your ballot expended to elect Sala Cameron

Banlish was eliminated in round 16 with 2173 votes

Artctura was eliminated in round 5 with 736 votes

Malcanis was elected before your vote got here

Unforgiven Storm was eliminated in round 11 with 1383 votes

Awol Aurix was eliminated in round 4 with 687 votes

DaeHan Minhyok was eliminated in round 1 with 246 votes

Mangala Solaris was elected before your vote got here

Psychotic Monk was eliminated in round 14 with 1844 votes

0.99% of your ballot expended to elect James Arget

1639 votes followed this vector:

['Sort Dragon', 'Sala Cameron', 'Banlish', 'mynnna', 'Kesper North', 'Kaleb Rysode', 'Awol Aurix', 'Artctura', 'Malcanis', 'Unforgiven Storm', 'DaeHan Minhyok', 'Mangala Solaris', 'Travis Musgrat', 'progodlegend']

74.47% of your ballot expended to elect Sort Dragon

Sala Cameron was elected before your vote got here

Banlish was eliminated in round 16 with 2173 votes

mynnna was elected before your vote got here

Kesper North was elected before your vote got here

Kaleb Rysode was eliminated in round 3 with 610 votes

Awol Aurix was eliminated in round 4 with 687 votes

Artctura was eliminated in round 5 with 736 votes

22.90% of your ballot expended to elect Malcanis  ß This explains the bump in the Strength/slot graph at #9

Unforgiven Storm was eliminated in round 11 with 1383 votes

DaeHan Minhyok was eliminated in round 1 with 246 votes

Mangala Solaris was elected before your vote got here

Travis Musgrat was eliminated in round 10 with 1103 votes

progodlegend was elected before your vote got here

2.63% of your vote was exhausted

595 votes followed this vector:

['Ripard Teg', 'Malcanis', 'Trebor Daehdoow', 'Ali Aras', 'Mangala Solaris', 'Nathan Jameson', 'Korvin', 'Corebloodbrothers', 'riverini', 'Roc Wieler', 'Psychotic Monk', 'James Arget', 'Unforgiven Storm', 'progodlegend']

63.40% of your ballot expended to elect Ripard Teg

32.82% of your ballot expended to elect Malcanis

Trebor Daehdoow was elected before your vote got here

Ali Aras was elected before your vote got here

Mangala Solaris was elected before your vote got here

Nathan Jameson was eliminated in round 17 with 2430 votes

3.77% of your ballot expended to elect Korvin

Corebloodbrothers was eliminated in round 12 with 1575 votes

riverini was eliminated in round 9 with 992 votes

Roc Wieler was eliminated in round 8 with 895 votes

Psychotic Monk was eliminated in round 14 with 1844 votes

James Arget was elected before your vote got here

Unforgiven Storm was eliminated in round 11 with 1383 votes

progodlegend was elected before your vote got here

The 1-vote vector peeps broke down like so:

577 "Greene Lee"

469 "Mangala Solaris"

454 "Corebloodbrothers"

410 "Korvin"

280 "progodlegend"

258 "Ripard Teg"

247 "Trebor Daehdoow"

239 "Psychotic Monk"

234 "Nathan Jameson"

225 "Chitsa Jason"

207 "Malcanis"

180 "Steve Ronuken"

176 "Mike Azariah"

175 "Sala Cameron"

169 "PsychoBitch"

156 "Ali Aras"

107 "riverini"

102 "Travis Musgrat"

82 "Ayeson"

82 "James Arget"

82 "Unforgiven Storm"

75 "Banlish"

67 "Roc Wieler"

62 "Sort Dragon"

55 "Kesper North"

48 "mynnna"

47 "Cipreh"

28 "Artctura"

25 "Awol Aurix"

21 "DaeHan Minhyok"

10 "Kaleb Rysode"

When we ran the STV-2 election to find the two most widely supported CSM members to be the new 2 permanent summit attendees in the 2+5 system we found that Mynnna and Ripard Teg were victorious, but that the difference between the 2^nd and 3^rd place candidates for the 2-seat guarantee was 299.11 votes between Ripard and Mangala (with Ripard winning).

Finally, let’s take a look at how many votes actually affected the outcome of this election in comparison to the CSM7 elections.

For CSM8 this number is easily found. The equation looks a little something like “candidates straight up elected + remainder votes for each person elected by default”, or in number form “10 * 3106 + 3091 (Korvin) + 2885 (Mike) + 2651 (James) + 2612 (Chitsa) = 42299 Votes”. This means that of the 49702 votes cast in the election 85.1% of them had a direct effect on the makeup of the council.

Finding this number for CSM7 is a little more difficult. 14,813 votes were cast for candidates that did not make the top 14. These are "under-votes" and had no effect on the final council. The more difficult area is determining “over-votes” (votes cast for a victorious candidate that did not affect their standing and could have been used to elect a different candidate). If you consider being in the top 14 to be “unaffected standing” then there were 26,348 over-votes cast in the CSM7 elections. If you feel that being one of the top 7 delegates is "unaffected standing" (as many do) then there were 12,495 votes cast for those in the top 7 that did not affect the election outcome. This means that of the 59,109 ballots cast in the election, 31,801 ballots affected the outcome of the top 7 and 17,948 ballots affected the outcome of the top 14; That comes out to be 53% and 30.3% enfranchised votes respectively.

This drastic improvement from 53% enfranchisement to over 85% is exactly what we were looking for when we made the move to Wright-STV. Now that a voters opinion is more likely to actually count towards the results of the election, our next big push will be towards visibility and voter turnout for the CSM9 elections.

If you would like to do your own analysis of the votes you can find the full list of ballots cast in .blt format here and the ballots we used in the STV-2 election here. Also, you can find the previously published Wright-WTV code used to process the ballot here.