Thank you everyone for taking the time to vote on the elections, for engaging with the tools that have been created to facilitate the voting, and for taking the time to provide the feedback. Running these elections with 70 candidates is a pilot and it is a great opportunity to learn together and with your support and input. We are gathering the lessons learned, so there can be improvements for the next time.
I am responding to some of the points made in the thread:
- The user interface and, as a result, the user experience for voting on the SecurePoll for 70 candidates with a Single Transferable Voting method is indeed sub-optimal. Unfortunately, we could not figure out how to make it more user friendly in a short time once it became clear that there would be 70 candidates. It would need essential changes on how the voting would happen. There are some suggestions for improvements in this thread (no dropbox, but clickable or drag & drop candidate chips; choosing a different voting method or creating 7-member districts). It would be great to receive further perspectives on this!
- Thank you, Lodewijk, for sharing practical guidance on how to make the most of the current user interface. Typing the first letter of the candidate name to find the right one in the dropdown box with 70 names is probably the best way to do it. A huge thank you to everyone who is taking the time to cast their vote!
- Ensuring the supporting materials to help people to make informed decisions has been a complex matter. The candidate statements add up to 55 pages of text, which is difficult to navigate. It seemed like a compass tool could be of help here, but it comes with its own complications:
- There was a 10-day window to submit the statements and a 5-day upvoting period. We did our best to communicate it widely on mailing lists (e.g. here and here) as well as social media groups, yet as there is so.much going on, not everyone noticed it in the timely manner.
- We are no longer collecting or upvoting statements. We hope that 19 that were selected are at least to some extent helpful in informing the voting. We are happy to receive the feedback regarding the statement collection and upvoting, so it would be possible to improve the process in the future.
- Election compass has its own user interface and experience challenges. We have opted for all the candidates being selected as default for comparison, as it provides a good comparison across the pool - this helps to have a good overview of the positions of all the candidates. However, this makes navigating their rationale statements more difficult, as it involves a lot of scrolling. Also, if one is interested in comparing 2 candidates, there is a lot of deselecting that needs to happen. It seemed that selecting candidates manually would bring more personal bias into use of the tool, so we have chosen the select all approach as default. Overall, it is the number of candidates that is creating the bulk of the navigation and comparison issues and we are open to feedback on how to improve this in the future.
- The length of the statements made by the candidates in the compass tool was capped to prevent us from creating another wall of text. While it helps to better understand the position of the candidate, it would create a further barrier for voter engagement, if the expression is not clear and concise. I believe that the word limits will be an essential part of the future elections and candidate statements, because it reduces the access barrier for voters and also facilitates translations to a wider range of languages, which makes the information even more accessible. What can be discussed is the exact limit size and also what information is the most helpful to collect from candidates.
- The tool that we used is Open Election Compass. We did not do a full code review for this, but we did not experience any anomalies in weighing of the votes during testing. If there are people who are interested in doing the code review, here is the link to the tool in GitHub.
- We are truly grateful to the community members who have stepped in and tried to make the information regarding the candidates more easily digestible. This goes a long way in supporting informed voting in this process! Thank you Dušan Kreheľ and Andrew Lih for your proactive and constructive approach!
I apologize for the length of the response - I have tried to break it up so the single points are more clear. I am available to respond to any further questions and specifications, as well as happy to receive any further feedback.
Wishing everyone a great week ahead!
Kaarel
