Hi everyone,

As the election has finished, with an interesting result, I figure it right to share some things that happened throughout the election, and share some issues we found as the election progressed. I’m also going to share some thoughts of how to move forward, as the current weightings ect. created some controversial results.

First off, Independent endorsements. Obviously, these are new. Initially I didn’t plan on implementing them however interest in them made me put them into place. The main reason I didn’t wish to implement them is that honestly, I wasn’t sure what I would do for it. In the end I decided that it would only be implemented for major politicians; e.g. former PMs/senior cabinet members or popular independents. I tried to avoid it having any influence over elections however it became unavoidable in one electorate due to an alternative issue that was found after the election was calculated. (I will discuss this in a bit). I was unable to do it as a conventional endorsement, like that of a party, as it would assume all independents supported that candidate, including those not up for election. In the end, I did it as a small custom modifier (<5%), whilst trying to avoid it affecting outcomes in electorates. In future, I will try to work out a system such that there is no personal influence into it (e.g. a former PM in the last x years would have a y modifier ect.) and that it can change outcomes.

Next, an error whilst I was handling the LNP-ANCAAP merger. If you hadn’t realised, some results on the stream differed to what was on the results sheet. When I did the find and replace all for ANCAAP on the calculator to LNP, I missed something I needed to manually update, essentially doubling the LNPs modifiers. I’m not sure how I missed this, however it was not discovered until I was confirming the results with Madi and the Executive Board. I want to make it clear; it did not change the outcome of any electorates, rather the LNP and anyone endorsed by them had a slightly higher first preference than they should’ve. This does mean that polls through the week would’ve likely had some inaccuracies. This is a rare error, however it happened and I want everyone to know that this did happen.

I want to talk about a specific electorate; Canberra. Obviously, the result was incredibly close and many were displeased with the outcome. Believe me, when I first calculated it I didn’t think it was right until I went through and ensured it was correct. This takes me back to the first point; I did say that I made sure independent endorsements did not change outcomes, and initially, Youma had won regardless of independent endorsements. However when the LNP issue was fixed, it had shifted the result such that independent endorsements had shifted the outcome. I understand that not many would be happy with this, and I will ensure that this does not happen again in the future. Part of Youma’s victory was as a result of their personal modifiers from all of the interviews they did. I’ll discuss this next, because the interviews gave Youma a lot of personal modifiers suddenly, despite me reducing the amount of modifiers she received from each interview as more were conducted.

That brings me onto my next point; weightings from persona press. It is obvious, from the Canberra outcome, that perhaps the weighting is too high. I’m going to discuss with the Executive Board, in consultation with Madi also, about what changes are necessary to make persona press more fair in the wider scheme, without de-incentivising persona press. We are also looking into the weightings of campaigns on national polling, as there were some unrealistic national polling outcomes.

Consider this thread also an elections complaints or questions thread; though please don’t make me repeat anything on this post as that will irritate me slightly.

Thanks everyone,

Anacornda

Electoral Moderator

(I didnt proofread this if there are errors, my bad.)