Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

CSM election results

I want to get into an analysis of the CSM9 election results, released yesterday by CCP Leeloo. Before I do that though, I think it worthwhile to fill the historical record back in. CSMs have only been getting elected for six years now and already the past record is getting a little obscured by the fog of war. So here they are, the results of all past elections:

Results	Elected	Voters	Turnout	Enfranchised	US Vote	UK Vote	Rus Vote
CSM 1	21/May/2008	24651	11.1%	64.3%	32.8%	15.6%	4.9% (5th)
CSM 2	24/Nov/2008	20112	8.6%	66.2%	34.4%	12.8%	3.4% (6th)
CSM 3	28/May/2009	27848	9.7%	71.7%	37.0%	13.1%	2.0% (10th)
CSM 4	02/Dec/2009	21158	7.4%	61.4%	35.6%	11.7%	5.2% (5th)
CSM 5	26/May/2010	39433	12.7%	64.0%	34.8%	12.3%	5.7% (4th)
CSM 6	26/Mar/2011	49096	14.3%	68.6%	36.2%	11.5%	8.0% (4th)
CSM 7	24/Mar/2012	59109	16.6%	75.0%	37.4%	11.2%	8.1% (3rd)
CSM 8	27/Apr/2013	49702	12.2%?	85.1%	38.0%	11.6%	5.4% (5th)
CSM 9	09/May/2014	31294	8.2%??	85.4%	40.2%?	12.6%?	2.9%? (7th)

Various notes:

• CCP Veritas published some analysis of the CSM8 election results.
• "Enfranchised" represents the percentage of votes that was cast for winning candidates. As a metric, this is somewhat loose and inaccurate. For instance, it does not take into account "wasted votes" for CSMs 1 through 7, i.e. over-votes that were cast for a candidate that were unnecessary to that candidate's victory. This was most notable in The Mittani's victory in CSM7, in which he had more than double the votes of the second place candidate and triple the votes he needed to secure a top seven spot.
• Still, enfranchisement does reflect the changing nature of the CSM vote, particularly the impact STV had on making sure as many votes as possible count toward the outcome.
• Germany and Canada are typically competing with Russia for 3rd and 4th most votes cast. However, since Russian CSM candidates tend to stand apart from the remainder of the CSM, it is interesting to to track the changing impact Russian votes have on the process. Their impact was maximized in CSM7, where there were two Russian CSM members and minimized on CSMs 3 and 9, which had and has none.
• CCP stopped officially reporting the nationalities of the winners with CSM6.
• CCP stopped officially reporting voter turnout by percentage with CSM7. CSM8's voter turnout percentage is an estimate based on voter make-up by country.
• CCP stopped officially reporting exact voter make-up by country with CSM8. CSM9's voter make-up by country is an estimate based on printing the pie chart of voter make-up by country and then measuring the circumference of the circle using hand tools.

Finally, CSM9's overall turnout was estimated based on the following criteria:

• CCP had previously announced that they had passed 500,000 subscribers on 1 March 2013.
• Does that number include Chinese subscribers? It probably does.
• There has been no announcement since then that the number of subscribers has increased significantly.
• Indeed, there's good reason to believe that the number has gone down somewhat. Had it gone up, there almost certainly would have been mention of EVE keeping up its unbroken record of increasing subscribers at one of two points:
• either at Fanfest during the CCP Presents presentation; or,
• during the marketing blitz surrounding the battle of B-R5RB.
• There was no such announcement at either time.
• Of total EVE players logged in over the course of a period of time, Tranquility represents 80%, Serenity 20%.
• If the 500k number includes China and overall EVE subscriptions are down 5% since then, then there are around 380k Tranquility accounts that were eligible for voting. The 31294 that voted represent 8.2% of accounts voting. If the 500k number does not include China and overall EVE subscriptions are down 5%, then there are around 475k Tranquility accounts that were eligible for voting and the 31294 that voted represents 6.6% of accounts voting.
• I've chosen to go with the higher turnout number.

Whew! On to analysis of the CSM9 results themselves.
Source: CSM election results