Some lessons to learn from the 2017 elections

Question

So, the election are over. Some statistics and factoids of interest.

1. From the election page:

   22,919 voters were eligible, 9,261 visited the site during the election, 4,655 visited the election page, and 2,161 voted

   This is quite a terrible statistics. Out of almost 10k users that could vote, and were online during this week, only half bothered to look at the election, and only about half of them bothered to even vote.

   I am not someone who espouses "everyone should vote". In fact, I would limit voting rights to people who at least passively follow the meta site. And it is definitely the case that a lot of people have little interest in meta-matters, and they should avoid voting as they usually don't read the meta site, and aren't very well aware of the more or less pressing issues that are on the agenda often.

   Nonetheless, I'd be happier if a higher percentage of people were more engaged to vote. At least of those who bothered to visit the election page.

2. Looking at the online statistics, one can open the ballots page. The first thing one notices, is that the first ballots have only one vote. In fact, the first ballot to even have a third vote is ballot number 77.

   Using grep -c "2</div" and grep -c 3</div on the html page, shows that nearly 300 people didn't choose a third candidate; and out of these only a 100 had cast a second-choice vote (specifically, out of 2161 ballots there are 1985 ballots with at least two votes; and 1865 ballots with all three votes (it might interest someone to know that all ballots had a first choice)).

   It is unclear, and probably impossible to know, if those partial ballots are due to lack of understanding the fact that one can vote for three candidates, or just people "gaming the election badges" and casting a vote for the first candidate on their page before moving on.

   But it is best to cast three out of three votes. And so, I am not sure what to make out of this whole thing.

3. As I remarked before. The last election was a rage. We had many participants, many third-party-nominations of users nominating other users. There was a lot more debate going on, and a lot more energy poured into the meta site.

   While I don't trust my memory to that degree, the election before that (2013) was also pretty active, even if not to the same degree. Or so I remember.

   Long story short, I feel that perhaps this election came more as a surprise to many people here, and was somewhat hastily. In my opinion, at least, giving the community another week before starting the official nomination process might have been conducive to a more active election.

I would love to hear some input from the members of the community as to what do they think about the elections we just had, and what lessons can we learn from these—and other—things.

Answer 1

1. Most people are here just for the mathematics and choosing moderators is a meta issue. Moderators are people who promise to help keep the site running, and even their very existence is somewhat irrelevant to many users. Perhaps the local soccer club needs to choose someone to take responsibility over finance, but most members of the club might have their sole interest in playing ball. And that's fine, the club exists for the purpose of facilitating the game, just like this site exists for facilitating certain mathematical exchanges.

   Some people have interests in the inner workings of the site, but they are a minority. There are way more mathematicians than metamathicians. The percentage of people who chose to vote is actually higher than I expected.

2. I knowingly voted for exactly one candidate and left two blanks. I did not care much about the answers to the questionnaire. I required two things of a person I would vote for:

   • Sufficient activity on meta, in review, and similar managerial aspects of the site.
   • My personal experience of how the particular user approaches other users and problematic situations.

   My votes are solely based on my personal experience with the candidates. I was mostly uninterested in their words in election discussions, but very interested in my memories of their past actions regarding my second point above. One could say that I will only vote for someone to become a moderator if I already think they are a good moderator and effectively act in that capacity. The line between moderators and some high reputation users is thin by design. Only one user passed my tests, so I only voted for them. I did not want to vote for anyone I don't have genuine support for.

3. Let me just point out that no matter how long the preparation stage is, most voters will presumably get to the election page when they get an announcement in their inbox and choose some candidates on a gut feeling. I don't think the amount of preparation or discussion has much effect on the majority's voting behavior. Granted, there are very active meta users and almost-moderators, but their weight in the overall voting is relatively small.

   To me it seems that the key effect of sufficient discussion and visibility is getting good candidates to run for the job. Many will need some time to consider whether they want the burden on themselves with the moderator work. I'm not very enthusiastic about voting for someone who is willing to commit to moderatorship after two seconds of thought — I assume some of the best candidates (from my point of view) will need some time to consider their commitments. Perhaps some more time would have produced more candidates for me to vote on.

I don't see anything to be alarmed of about the election.

Answer 2

re 2, as a non-regular occasional visitor, I struggled in choosing my 3rd vote, I think people who are not actively checking meta or other posts in the main site might have had similarly hard time in deciding who to vote for. Questionnaire is a useful thing but it is mostly the claims of users about themselves. If I haven't seen enough of their interactions with others on the site and their involvement on the meta discussions and how they approach policies I don't feel comfortable voting for them, I see the alternative as casting my vote randomly which is not a good thing in my opinion.

re 1, I personally don't think it is a really bad thing that only those who are actively involved in the site vote. In principle, moderator role should be an extension of what a user is already doing, right? Even if someone doesn't get elected as a moderator they should be actively involved in cleaning up junk, closing bad questions, editing to improving questions and answers, helping in building consensus on good policies and norms on meta, helping resolve disagreement and building a good environment for others to participate and feel good about the site, and do so by leading by example. Most of these do not require moderator privileges, a healthy established site like MSE should have enough active users with high enough rep that most of these are dealt with even without moderators.

As I see it moderator privileges are to deal with infrequent exceptions that normal users cannot deal with, e.g. users trying to game the voting system, dealing with problematic users that create toxic environment for others, users persistently and consciously violating agreed upon policies, quickly deleting occasional spam posts, calming down and resolving heated discussions that lead to "requires moderator attention" flags, and a bit more authority in explaining what the policies and norms of the site are to new users. And as far as I understand these are the reason why moderators exists, the things in the previous paragraph do not need moderator privileges really. To perform these duties requires giving moderators access to non-public information and unilateral actions and requires establishment of some level of trust over time. Can I really cast a meaningful vote if I have not interacted with a candidate directly nor observed their interactions with others? I don't feel so. My vote would be either a random one or based on how others think (in which case I am just amplifying their vote).

By the way, for future elections, I think it would be rather helpful (at least to me) to ask candidates to provide some examples of how they have behaved in those exceptional situations on the site and also their contributions to meta discussions.

Answer 3

I voted for 3 candidates. I am not a very active member, but here is my perspective.

9,261 visited the site during the election. 
4,655 visited the election page. 
2,161 voted.

I think this makes sense to me. I did not even know there was a meta site for a very long time. I am sure that would be the case for a lot of users. Of the 9261 users who visited the site during election, many would be new/recent members, whose main interest in this site is the answers to their questions. Even if all of them saw the notification, it is not surprising to me that 50% of those didn't want to go to the election page. Having gone to the election page, there are detailed Q&A for each contender. To meaningfully vote, one needs to read through those, which needs time. Plus it is very likely that a recent members do not know the contestants well enough. That was the case for me at least. I knew 2 of the candidates because they have answered my questions in the past and I have general seen their activity on the main site. I voted for the 3rd candidate purely based on the what the candidate had written. So 45% actual votes makes sense again.

Answer 4

Thanks for collecting these pieces of data. Digesting it all, and its relation with the outcome of the election, will take a while. As I spent one bike ride to work thinking about this I share my impressions with you all.

1. I am against limiting the right to vote. We have come a long way since that privilege was limited to men owning land worth 40 shillings or more. Even in modern times there have been attempts to limit the right to vote by various political entities, but I don't recall much good having come from such attempts. Ideally we would like the voters to be informed, and educate them about why it is a good idea to be informed, but even many modern societies continue to fail in that task. And continue to disagree about what being informed means. If it cannot be done here in a community of educated people, then...
2. But, I also agree that voters should make a serious effort to learn about the issues and the candidates. Not mentioning the fact that an election is going on. May be most of the voters actually felt that they are not sufficiently informed, and hence abstained from voting? A very disciplined decision, if you ask me. Anyway, I don't have much sympathy for the users who said they didn't notice that an election is coming. I mean, it's not like the notice to demolish your planet was posted only in the Proxima Centauri office. Pay attention to those local affairs (or forfeit your right to complain)!
3. The discussion preceding this election was possibly less heated than what we had prior to couple earlier ones. Or was it? Here our personal perception will necessarily be colored by how high a stake we held in the key issues (if any). The previous election was held shortly after we had discussed the issues with PSQs/homework and "the massive campaign" lead by Normal Human to delete unworthy threads. May be we have since converged towards a more universally accepted policy? I'm not sure, but may be this time such divisive issues were absent simply because no new important ones emerged? I'm not saying that the PSQ problem would now be solved, you all know that it isn't. But, now we collectively understand the matter a lot better (and hopefully also where the other side stands). No surprise changes in site dynamics - just the same old grumble, grumble.
4. You pay particular attention to meta participation. While I largely agree, I have some nagging doubts revolving around the questions 1) Does the meta discussion actually fairly represent the views of our user base? 2) Does it matter if the answer to the preceding question is "No"? Ideally I like to think that meta is a home to all the letters-to-the-editor, but I'm not sure it works that way as well as it should. I'm somewhat worried about the possibility that meta has become not unlike an official newsletter of a single party. A prominent (but recently silenced) dissenting voice may have done a disservice to all opposition by alienating the regulars with their rhetoric, but surely we don't want to shun all differences of opinions. I don't have a huge problem with this, because I apparently support that meta party. OTOH it is my job to take care of the entire user base. Early in my tenure, after yet another meta-quarrel with Bill, a more experienced moderator gave me the piece of advice. Don't feel too good about it (=the support from other meta regulars). Bill's views are more popular than you may think.
5. But, a point still is that unless the opposition (if any) expresses their views in meta we will not know about the existence of those views. So, we should welcome opposing views, and make good faith attempts to see their points. If only to keep the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad rolling.

The usual caveat is that I don't necessarily know the difference between a moderator being transparent about their views and actions and a moderator indulging in public introspection.

Answer 5

I saw that an election was happening and that candidates had been nominated, and read some of the Q&A, but I didn't realize it was time to vote. My assumption (from not reading the sprawling election-related pages too closely) was that the discussions would go on for at least another week or two before it was time to cast votes.

Answer 6

Voting in an SE election is not a trivial task, especially if one takes it seriously. I'm not really sure if I'm eligible to vote here because I'm eligible on so many SE sites that I tend to get a deluge of inbox messages about upcoming elections.

For all but one site that I'm eligible to vote on, I just don't spend the time on the main site or meta to have any experience with any of the candidates. So I don't even try to vote. I have limited time to spend on SE in general and I assume there are many more engaged community members who will make far more informed moderator decisions.

I wonder how these election statistics compare to other SE sites. It seems that there's a concern here that a small portion of eligible users voted, but having more than two thousand voting members sounds like a lot compared to many other stacks. Maybe it's better that the casual users like me are not voting.

Answer 7

Maybe it would be good to have an obviously accessible page where the bios of existing moderators are given, and each gives a short account of what being a moderator involves "We are the people who ... " and what is actually done behind the scenes to help users and manage the site. That would humanise the task somewhat, and help people to understand what good moderator behaviour might involve.

Another idea would be to have a prompt for each user once when nominations are open and once during the voting period so that when people take an action like posting a question, answer or comment they are prompted "nominations for new moderators are open" or "you are now able to vote in the moderator election for this site" with an option to dismiss or to go to the election page.

Another prompt in the election section could be "how to explore the candidates profiles on the site" - the tools are there, but not everyone knows how to use them.

I voted for three, though I had two very clear preferences and the third was a close call between two. I considered only two votes, but I always try to use all my options.

Answer 8

This isn't a response directly to the question but to a comment by OP: however, I think it's worth pulling out as a separate discussion point.

People who don't want to participate, don't have to participate. But as Jonas Meyer pointed in the comments, the questionnaire thread on meta has much less views than the number of voters. Even if each person only viewed it once (which is grossly not true), this is still a problematic situation. ...

My experience over many elections on various StackExchange sites is that the questionnaire threads are always long and almost completely uninformative. I'm sure that some people find value in them, but I started ignoring them long ago. I prefer to read the candidates' nomination statements, which are both more succinct and IMO more informative, because a candidate's explanation of why they think they're the person for the job tells me what they think moderation is, which is one of the attributes I weight heavily in deciding whom to vote for.

One thing which might persuade me to revisit this opinion would be to transpose the questionnaires. (I suddenly have a sense of déjà vu: I may have made this same comment on another meta site in the past year). Having one Q&A per question rather than one ten-part question with corresponding 10-part answers would make it easier to ignore the anodyne questions and just look at the ones which seem useful for discrimination, and easier to scan the answers to a given question to see whether all of them are near enough identical. Given the importance of elections within the meta-side of a stack, I don't think it would be disproportionate to have 10 active questions in the meta site, with the question solicitation thread edited to serve as an index.

Answer 9

Regarding Point 1

We do not elect moderators for the meta and meta alone. We elect them overwhelmingly based on their capability to manage the regular use purpose, which is the main site.

Excluding otherwise-eligible users from voting because they are only interested in asking and answering mathematics questions while being held to high standards, and not the politics or deep management, is nonsensical. They have every right to be represented in their choice of who arbitrates issues during their time here.