# CSM 8 Results

Well, they’ve released the ballots for CSM 8, and unsurprisingly, I still haven’t won.

What you can get from the ballots, after processing them, is the following output.

So, there were a total of 17 rounds, With 31 candidates, and 14 being elected, this is pretty obvious stuff. With the way the Wright STV system works, one candidate is eliminated each round, then the entire election run again as if there had been no votes for them. When you have 14 candidates remaining, they’re all elected.

The order of elimination:

1. DaeHan Minhyok
2. Cipreh
3. Kaleb Rysode
4. Awol Aurix
5. Artctura
6. Ayeson
7. PsychoBitch
8. Roc Wieler
9. riverini
10. Travis Musgrat
11. Unforgiven Storm
12. Corebloodbrothers
13. Steve Ronuken
14. Psychotic Monk
15. Greene Lee
16. Banlish
17. Nathan Jameson

Obviously, I’d have prefered, if not elected, to be eliminated in the last round. But round 13 isn’t too bad for someone with no track record. Sure, some people have heard of me, but my name isn’t ‘out there’.

There are some people who find the system too confusing. For them, I’ll give a /very/ layman version. For a little more detail, take a look at mynnna’s blog post on it.

Short version:

It takes $\frac{Total votes}{Number of positions +1}$ to get someone elected. So, then someone is provisionally elected (You aren’t elected until it’s actually over.), you take the all the votes for that person, take all the people provisionally elected off the front of it, and reassign the votes to the next candidate on them. These votes are worth $\frac{number of votes over what was needed}{number of votes for the candidate}$

Once you’ve got a bunch of provisionally elected people, and all the votes have finished cascading, if you don’t have enough of them, you eliminate the lowest scoring candidate, scrub their number from all the votes and start all over again. If votes are exhausted (No candidates left on them) then they’re discarded and the numbers required are recalculated for that round.

It’d be annoying to do by hand, but a computer can chug through them fairly simply.

Most people had hit over 90% of voting power by the 5th candidate.

One interesting side effect of this. If it had been a 15 person CSM, rather than 14, Banlish would have got in, rather than Nathan Jameson (who was eliminated last). This is just because more would have trickled down from votes from mynnna and so on, as they’d have needed less to be elected.

I’ve seen some people saying that nullsec is overly represented. Some saying under represented. Both groups are wrong. Of the voting population, there is proper representation. Strategic bloc voting doesn’t give those blocs more power (Except by getting people to vote the full power of their ballot.) Now, I do wish more people had voted, but you can hardly complain about not being represented, when you didn’t vote.

Next year, I’m hoping CCP do more to promote the CSM to players who are hard for us to reach (without spamming the fuck out of them.) And while it’s not ideal, for a world where we have informed voters, I hope they set it up so you can set up links to prefill the ballot for people, without the need for bookmarklets.