The CSM elections are upon us again, and once again, many people think that things are weighted against them. They feel like voting for the CSM is not going to help. Frequently, comments are heard like:
“Elections are rigged in favor of nullsec candidates”
“The blocs control the vote”
While these sentiments may be widespread, they miss the real point, and even work against the people expressing them. The big question should be why the blocs control the votes.
The answer is organization. They put out ballots and some of their members vote the way they are told.
In my opinion most of the blocs don’t even vote with all their power. But low turnouts allow for even minimal organization to beat the opposition. Last year the turnout was 22345 votes. Goonswarm alone is 25000 members strong at the moment.
What’s Wrong With Highsec?
We always hear stories about most of EVE’s playerbase sitting in highsec. So naturally high sec candidates should get some strong backing. So why do we see (or think we see) no candidates from high sec “winning”? Do people that are not involved in the meta or consume out of game content even know about the election?
I myself have listened to interviews and podcasts pretty much on every commute and sometimes even at home or at work. This amounts to about 30-40 hours in the last 4 weeks. But does Mr. Joe Highsec do the same thing? Probably not.
This year we are seeing a highsec ticket formed by Roedyn, Commander Aze and Toxic Yaken. But will that be enough? What they need is people voting for them. It all comes down to getting people to vote and trying to organize against those evil powerful nullsec blocs that take all of the votes and leave you no chance.
So who should be responsible for getting people to vote? I asked one candidate from the highsec ticket and was told that he had tried campaigning in highsec systems. Most reactions where things like “get rekt” or just no interaction at all. So while campaigning can probably reach some people, getting them to make informed decisions or even going through the effort to vote is something different.
Make It Easy, and Get the Word Out
Why can’t we have the vote ingame? By now we have video tutorials in game. Give every candidate a small website he can design. Either link to his interviews, just give an overview about himself or embed a small youtube video. Nobody just hearing about the vote is reading 64 candidate pages out of game. And having to log into your account in an external browser adds even more effort to this thing.
There also have been no e-mail notification about the election whatsoever. CCP can calculate the networth of millions of characters and their billions of items. How hard would it be to send a weekly reminder to all accounts that have not voted about the election as long as it is running? Notifications about sales on PLEX or SKINs seems to be working flawlessly.
So CCPlease help out a bit here. If you don’t want to keep pushing for a varied CSM you might as well just nominate people to it and skip the vote. We know the CSM had some rough years but it was a mighty tool during the summer of rage. After years of decay, an almost all-new CSM with new CCP leadership has shown this year that it can be that mighty tool again.
This year the Council was reduced to 10 members. We were told that it is not because of the money. We were told the CSM is a very valueable tool. But I can’t see any effort being put into by CCP.
So please: If you have not voted this year, go ahead and take some time out of your day to inform yourself. Voting is open until March, 27th. Your vote counts, but only if you use it.
