Elections?

[kid]

Well, I just got home. Changing one's vote during an active election has precedent. I recall seeing it happen a few times in the past, so no issue from my end. I also received no complaints or requests for inquiry from any members either. So, I'll go make the official announcement thread now, congratulating shadow on his election. I would lock this thread now, except I lost my moderator rights, heh. Thanks all.

You are getting a complaint/request and inquiry from a member right now.
None of my questions have been answered yet.

What precedent is there?
By what rule is that allowed?
And assuming there is a precedent, is there one for doing it hours before the elections end for reasons that are not technical?

And beyond all that, regardless of justifying this one poor decision, looking ahead, can our current LA honestly tell me he thinks that changing votes during an active election is a good idea? Even more so when it's not based on any current rule we have?

[HEEGZ]

I'm sorry for not more carefully reading the election thread earlier, as I was in a hurry and merely skimmed the thread. Changing one's vote has happened off and on during elections for the last ten years that I've been a member. I guess someone could go dig through all of the old posts for proof, but I don't have the time or inclination to do that. There is precedent and I guess you can take my word for it, and the word of others who are also familiar.

I'm not sure what else to tell you. Sometimes people change their votes mid election and the IA has always taken that into account. As far as I can tell, the election happened fairly and properly. Even if you remove a single vote from either candidate, to account for Rumple's vote change, the outcome would remain the same. So, for the amount of time it would take to find proof for you of past precedent, the end result would still be the same. I think most people would agree to trust the memory of current admin and have us focus on providing more DM coverage and tech support than digging through old forum posts to provide actual proof to back it up.

If the charter is not crystal clear, perhaps our new LA can include proposals to refine the wording to make it more explicit. Hope that helps clear things up, kid. I hope my standing in the community is enough to give you some piece of mind, as I think everything is well above board in this case. Thanks!

[HEEGZ]

So, I went and looked at the charter. Here is the relevant passage:

Election Oversight
The Lead Administrator shall be charged with ensuring that as fair and as impartial elections as possible shall be held. This includes working with members of the Website and Server staff to create anonymous, yet verifiable, databases of voters, auditing elections, and conveying the audited results to the community, or the appropriate Administrator, in case of a tie.

I feel that our election was both fair and impartial as possible. One could say, that not allowing members to change their votes mid election would be unfair, given the precedent from previous elections. I suppose the only remaining possibility is for me to ask Foam to do an audit of those who voted in the runoff for LA this week. I'm not sure how long this will take, and I also feel it is unwarranted. I can't think of anything else I can do about this on my end at this point. I'm sorry that this bothered you so much, but I honestly feel that no harm has been done here.

[FoamBats4All]

Jesus Christ, you're still not done with this?

[Heero]

ALFAs done gone bush league.

[kid]

I don't want anyone to waste (anymore) time.
I have no problem with SF as LA (i'm sure he'll do a good job).

I do have an issue with rules being enforced arbitrarily, without guidelines, especially when it comes to ALFA singular signature feature, it being a "democracy", and more so when it is done with a clear conflict of interests.
(More so when the response of the person who has that conflict of interests is "Get over it".)

I trust that you have a faint memory of vote being chanced, I even trust that no foul play has been made.
I don't trust that fact that we have no clear guidelines to our elections.
That there are no clear guidelines to changing one's vote, and that this, still, looks bad.

A change of a vote at the last moment to overturn the election feels wrong, it feels like tampering, and it should be, at the very least, clarified, defined and perhaps (to my opinion) prohibited in the future.

Treating our elections as "Eh, you're still on this thing" just makes me feel like I should treat every single rule ALFA has with the same reckless disregard. "Someone did it at some point... So... I'm sure it's okay."
While ignoring when and how someone did this, under what circumstances, and a rule that says that doing it back then was allowed.
In the absence of a clear LA ruling that says changing votes is allowed, making that ruling at the final stages of an election (by someone who's not the LA no less), seems wrong.

[Zelknolf]

To be clear, the election happened under HEEGZ's oversight. The election was not complete until HEEGZ said it was, and we would do whatever he said was necessary to run the election. If HEEGZ asked for an audit or a recount, we would do it. If HEEGZ asked for a redo for any reason, we would redo it.

The conflict of interests that you keep complaining about wasn't here any more than it is with any of our day to day operations. People with responsibility for things don't always have the technical ability to manage those things.

[HEEGZ]

There are plenty of things that are status quo in ALFA that are not explicit in the charter. People have always been allowed to change their votes. As acting LA, I had no issue with a vote change because that is normative. There is no need for a charter change IMO, because everything happened as it always has. I'll leave it to future admin to make any clarifications if it is warranted. A last minute vote change on the last day of a close election could be construed as suspicious, but the other candidate had no objection to the change and no one else has either as far as I can tell, except maybe swift? This is an electronic vote for a gaming community, to elect people to administer our project. I'm not sure where democracy and real world elections fit into this, but it is already a fairly complex voting process, that is clearly laid out, and has been followed pretty exactly almost every month that I've been a member here. I will not be issuing a request for an audit, as I believe the election went fine. The present administration can decide how to run things in the future as they see fit I guess.

I'll not be posting about this any further. People are welcome to PM me if you want though, and I will be happy to respond in private.

[kid]

yes, I understand, I guess this isn't really important, I'ts just a game...
I guess our other rules and guidelines aren't really important either.

I've never seen a vote change. the "Normative" idea you speak of isn't that normative I think.
More so when we keep saying it happened yet struggle to find examples.
The reason, I think, is that there never was a vote change in the last hours before an election's end that changed the outcome.

The other candidate has nothing to do with it. CD may or may not have interest in this, but the ALFA electorate has an interest that elections will be held by clear and strict rules, with no arbitrary rulings that may or may not give advantage to candidates.
Clearly in this case it is just a lucky chance that the person making the (Oh, so common yet never heard of) decision was both not allowed to make it, as well as gifted his BBF the win by making it.

Anyways, thank you all for your answers. They helped me understand who are the people running this place these days, and about the standards they hold themselves to.

I expected more.

[Heero]

Just let it ride, kid.

When you look back years from now you can say to yourself, 'Self, thats when ALFA jumped the shark'.

[danielmn]

TO be fair Heegz, the outcome would NOT have been the same. Taking a vote from shadow, adding it to cloud. would have = a tie, no decisive winner, in which case you would have likely flipped a coin. ((that's if the vote had not been allowed to change)) But yes, striking the vote altogether still brings the same outcome.

The real question is, how much XP Rumples vote was bought for, so I know what to value mine at in the next election I can take part in.

[Zelknolf]

If it was a tie, Mikayla would pick the next lead admin. LA only picks if the seat up for election isn't LA. If Mikayla failed to do so for whatever reason, Foam and I would have to somehow reach a majority on the topic. Presumably this would be easy, because it's easy to tell what the majority opinion held at the end of the election, because a guy who could break the tie was asking to change his vote.

Charter's written so that there's always a clear winner. Kinda need that to make sure there's butts in seats.

[danielmn]

Apologies. Mik woulda flipped a coin.

[CloudDancing]

Rumple told me he did it out of concern for my well-being.

You take what you can from that.

[Swift]

People have always been allowed to change their votes.

From my recollection, they have only been able to change it if a technical issue caused their vote to be registered in a way not consistent with who they actually chose. Not liking the way the wind has started to blow after you have voted was never a valid reason. Again, this is all from my own recollection.

Just let it ride, kid.

When you look back years from now you can say to yourself, 'Self, thats when ALFA jumped the shark'.

This will probably go down as merely the latest in a long line of ALFAs prestigious shark jumping career