Dear all

interesting idea with the regional primaries but I am not sure it is the right way. It seems that having more rounds would alienate voters more than draw them in. We keep having so many elections. Remember, there would have to be elections for the electoral committee that would coordinate the primaries in the regions in addition to a central/global election committee. And there would have to be a committee to decide how those primaries will be run and what the distribution of the regional seats will be and so on. But then it is still probably easier and fairer than trying to coordinate who will be _the_ candidate that all of one region should vote for. And more transparent.
Not having done any kind of research on this, my hunch is that a big factor in this election was name recognition. There are tons of people who do good work and lead well but are just not easily recognized "household names" for community members on a global scale, they might be recognized within their region. Voters should try to get to know the candidates a bit more, invest an hour and listen to their statements, read about their ideas and accomplishments. The session at Wikimania was quite useful for this purpose.

Be well!

Matej

On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 8:11 PM Steven Walling <steven.walling@gmail.com> wrote:


On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 1:21 AM Bobby Shabangu <bobby.shabangu@wikimedia.org.za> wrote:
Very interesting conversations here! 

 
And indeed I agree with Florence. There really needs to be serious voter education especially in global South Communities, focusing on how the transferable voting system works. I went to these elections very worried about the same thing, raising it sharply during our candidate onboarding session.

I was disappointed during WikiIndaba conference to hear a number of the conference participants wishing me well with the elections adding that they only voted for me!

Anyway, we live to fight another day,  thanks to everyone who voted for me - placing me as their top 4 candidate in their vote.  And congrats once again to the elected candidate. 

Best regards,
Bobby Shabangu

Rather than just thinking about how to teach voters how to vote, we should consider ways to adjust the process to make it more intuitive to understand. We have the opportunity to do this as part of the Board governance conversation that is collecting feedback now I think?

The data is clear that ranking this many candidates is overly complex and many voters won’t do it. The data also reflect real-world confusion in political elections implementing ranked choice voting. 

The eligibility requirements round did a good job of eliminating a few candidates that would likely not have performed well. We really need to think about ways to decrease the number of candidates to a more reasonable number if we want to increase voter participation. 

For instance, we could consider regional primaries where we specifically ask voters from a given set of wikis and organizations to nominate 1-2 Board candidates from their combined geographic + language region. It wouldn’t be perfect but with predefined voter participation thresholds and more targeted campaigns, it could make election outreach more effective at driving proportionally greater voting. This kind of equity is why the Global Council idea was brought forth, but we could achieve a similar outcome without creating an entirely new governance body.