The rise of the non-aligned voter (and fail of the null leaders)

Thursday is generally for business posts, and there was one for today. But it will be shifted to Friday to give space to this recent development.

The CSM election ballots are finally published and you can download it too. Many people did to calculate ordered lists, but I was interested in something else: the power of the blocks. Mynnna wrote: "Null bloc votes, as identified by Two Step: 9823+10957+5999 = 26799, 53.9% of the votes. Null bloc candidates: Five (Myself, Kesper, Sort, Sala and Progodlegend), which is about 35% of the council. I suppose you could count Malcanis as well, as the HBC ballot was instrumental in electing him and he is technically part of the bloc, but even that's only 42%. Basically, I'm saying that I think the people who were claiming that STV is all about rigging it for nullsec (ya'll know who you are) can put down their tinfoil hats. If anything we're under represented. "

Mynnna is wrong. He is wrong because Two Step was wrong identifying the voter blocks. Part of it was that he only looked for a few patterns, and looked for it everywhere in the ballot, while only the first spots had serious effect on the outcome. Below you can see a spreadsheet. Its fields show how many ballots have a certain candidate or pair of candidates in the top 7 places. I choose 7 because according to CCP that had 98.26% of the power of the ballots and because former CSMs had 7 Icelandic positions, so many people considered this an important number. The green background ones belong to one character, you can see that 12672 ballots had Mynnna on one of their top 7 positions. Next to it you can see "925", saying 925 people had both Mynnna and Ripard Teg on their top 7 spots.

Can you see the shocking result? Or just a bunch of numbers? Let me clear it up for you. At first I divided each line with the self-vote result, so every number of the first line was divided by 12672. From there the first line shows how big percentage of the Mynnna voters voted also for the other winner candidates. Then color-coded the fields, with the average value being white, below-average is red, above average is green. Finally I rearranged the candidates according to their cross-votes:
Now it's clearer, right? It shows that Mynnna, Kesper, Sort and Sala voters placed the other 3 to their ballots with high chance, though far from 100%. Only 75% of the Mynnna voters voted for Kesper, not really a good thing for CFC leadership. The cross-CFC-HBC votes were even smaller, though still high. What is more important here is that the rest of their lines and columns are red, meaning that those who voted for the CFC-HBC block ballot were unlikely to vote for other winning candidates (likely voted for non-winning block ones) and also that the voters of other winning candidates were unlikely to vote for them.

Following them comes the WH-pair. Their columns are red, so the non-WH voters were unlikely to vote for them, but their out-of-block lines are not red meaning that the WH voters were likely to support Mangala, Ripard, Trebor, instead of the WH 5 as instructed. Since the WH5 was a 5-long ballot, all of them fit into the top 7. According to the instructions, all WH pilots should have placed the 5 WH candidates to the top 5 positions in some order. Let's check it out: Ouch! If everyone would follow the instructions, we should have seen 100% everywhere! The chance that a voter of a WH candidate also supported another WH candidates was around 50%! It seems the cooperation of the candidates is not enough to make their voters cooperate! Did it matter? To see that, you should know that STV runs in rounds, every round eliminating one candidiate. The ballots that had this candidate at the top position move to the next one on the list, so the rest of the candidate gain votes. Let's see how did it happen with the Wormhole 5: The first eliminations gained 27 votes to the wormholers from voters who placed someone else first and wormholers behind. Then Cipreh got eliminated. At this move the WH top votes decreased by 155, which means that out of the 590 Cipreh voters 155 did not place another WH-er behind Cipreh. They gained 48 more voters with further eliminations and spillovers until Ayerson got eliminated, draining 310 out of 737, 42% of the Ayerson voters from the WH pool. Looking at the end of the run, it's likely that even that wouldn't get a third WH-er in, but still you can see the point. Same for the HBC-CFC block vote: when Kaleb Rysode was eliminated, 17% of his votes went to people who are not on the block list, half of it directly to the unaligned ones. When Banlish was eliminated, 41% of his votes leaked away from the null block.

After the two WH winners, there is a huge green field: the unaligned ones. See how these voters supported all candidates. They also got support from WH and Progodlegend voters, but gave no support to out-of-block candidates. It shows a huge number of votes supporting all of these candidates. Please note that the HBC member Malcanis belongs here. Despite what Mynnna wrote, the HBC votes were not getting him the seat. The Sort Dragon voters barely gave him more votes than they gave to Progodlegend and this was mutual. Those people supported Malcanis who supported the other unaligned ones. The null block was simply outnumbered by the unaligned ones. They were not simply voting randomly, they seem to like all these CSMs.

At the bottom corner sits Progodlegend all alone. His column is red, showing that no other winner had significant amount of voters who also supported him.


Hubris made nullsec leaders tell that they could place a basketball to their ballot and win. It seems their line members were not really motivated to support a basketball and many did not vote, or did not follow the official ballot! I was in TEST for months but never heard of Banlish, and probably other TEST voters neither. At least Sort and Sala often bridged me. For CSM9 the null leaders should take their own members seriously. Maybe they should run pre-eliminaries, finding candidates that have the real support of their members. Same goes to the Wormhole people. If those WH people who had no affiliation to any candidate had the same 50% "cross-support" as the affiliated ones, many WH votes were cast on non-WH candidates, mostly on the unaligned block. With 3 widely accepted candidates, they could get them all in.