CSM8 Election Turnout

Just a quick post about voter turnout for this year's CSM election. Poetic Stanziel has blogged his concerns, not only about the reduced turnout but how this was as a result of mishandling by CCP and CSM7. Whilst I think CCP could have done more to promote participation in the voting system, I don't think they are entirely to blame.

Let's compare last year's CSM7 election voting pattern with that of CSM8. Please note that the graph displayed below shows a couple of outliers as a result of the different binning CCP have used when releasing the figures for each year.


Notice that the distribution is reasonably consistent between CSM7 and CSM8 and largely in line with character age distribution, based upon the publicly available data from eveboard.

My personal opinion is that many players were turned off by the more involved STV voting system. Not the system itself, but the actual effort involved in casting ones' votes. I'm so invested in the game that I voted just as soon as I possibly could. With 2 accounts and a hard copy of who I was going to vote for, it took me all of five minutes to make 14 selections on each. The process was relatively painless but certainly took longer than last year's election.

For next year, I'd like to see CCP develop tools that would make the voting process effortless, particularly for players with multiple accounts. What form those tools might take, I will leave in CCP's capable hands.