So, we've just had an election, and I have some thoughts on it that I'd like to share here. I'll divide this post into sections, ranging from takes hottest to coolest.

Maybe preferential voting is a bad idea?

OK, hear me out on this one. Obvioiusly removing preferential voting would be a pretty big change from IRL. But in my view, the aim of our elections should mainly be to reward players who were active throughout the term and in the campaign. I don't think preferential voting is the best model to do that -- instead, it can just end up rewarding those who are the best at making backroom deals.

Given the method of how-to-vote cards that we use, preferences can essentially be entirely coordinated by parties, which incentivises them to run a large amount of candidates for no other reason apart from using them for preferences. This means that campaigners who were the most active can still end up losing because of a poor preference flow.

I think that a first-past-the-post system would be better. It discourages parties from unnecessarily running paper candidates, and rewards the candidates who are the most active. Given we don't have party leanings in sim, it's not as if there could potentially be a vote splitting situation, where, say, two strong left-wing candidates cannibalise each other's vote and elect a right-wing candidate -- instead, our system just rewards campaigning, debating, and the like, so presumably two strong ideologically similar competitors would just come in first and second instead of, as would happen IRL, likely splitting each other's vote.

Should parties be able to attack each other on IRL issues?

I'm not super convinced in either direction, but a talking point of the CPA campaign this election was the Winter Crisis -- essentially, claiming that the SPA had done nothing on the issue of power outages in the eastern states that are happening IRL. But with so much in-sim investment in renewables, would this even be an issue? Is it fair to attack in-sim governments on issues they can't reasonably control? Again, it'd be difficult to make a decision on what the canon situation is even if we decided the IRL power outages aren't canon, but thought I'd mention this to at least provoke discussion, because it is an interesting topic.

Posting after the deadline

Honestly, I kind of think that extensions to the deadline shouldn't be permitted. I'm aware that there can be legitimate reasons for not being able to post outside of say, a certain day -- I know that Frod, for example, was busy with exams, and I don't think there's a problem with him not being penalised for posting all on one day -- but I cannot see any possible legitimate reason for not being able to post between the four days of Tuesday and Friday, but being able to post between midnight on Friday and midday on Saturday. It's just straight-up laziness or procrastination. I don't mind extensions being permitted for, say, an hour after midnight, but that should really be the limit. If you genuinely are too busy to post a single campaign post in a four day period, maybe consider stepping back from AustraliaSim and focusing on real-life commitments.

Manifestos

I think manifestos should probably be posted before the campaign, not during. Allowing them to be left potentially to the end of the campaign means that other parties can't meaningfully criticise the policies in the manifesto. Not much else to add to that.