Election Aftermath - Development Log #528

In this week's devlog Michi talks about the aftermath of the recent election on Promitor.

Michi (molp)

I spent a lot of my available time this week dealing with the aftermath of the recent election on Promitor. See devlog #527 for context.

The first step was retrieving and looking into the actual voting data for Promitor’s term 67. We then aggregated the voter and candidate data with data from other systems we have, like account and payment data. It became obvious that there are many accounts that didn’t show any activity other than voting. All these accounts had in common that they had been created recently, had almost no progress in the game and very low activity ratings. The suspicion grew that these have been created for the single purpose of voting. To visualize the impact, I created the following graph:

We then decided that these accounts are definitely in conflict with our ToS and deleted them. Since two elected candidates had no votes left, we removed them from the parliament, effectively reducing it from five to three seats. That shifted the balance of power, and the taxes and fees were quickly reset to pre-election values.

I posted about these developments on April 23rd to give a heads-up and also to show that we are taking the issue seriously and are looking into it.

After that we received a lot of feedback, messages in the forums and on Discord, which we are very thankful for.

One of the most controversial topics that have been discussed is why we didn’t ban Euu, Tnn, and yfj911 outright. After all, it seems as if they orchestrated these accounts. While we do have our own opinions on that, we were unable to link the group to the creation and usage of these puppet accounts with absolute certainty. If we had banned them, we would create a dangerous precedent, where anyone could create a few fake accounts, let them vote for the political opponent and then have that opponent be banned by us.

Instead, we want to take a different approach and improve the election system to make it less vulnerable to election sniping. A small first step is to hide the current vote count during the election. That makes it harder to estimate how many votes are required to turn an election. But that also goes for everyone else. If the goal is to get as many candidates into office as possible, players would have to spread their votes across a range of candidates. While this might be justified for heavily contested elections like the recent one, it shouldn’t be something players have to do all the time. Instead, we want to change the voting system to “approval voting”: This basically means that a player can vote for as many candidates as they like, e.g. everyone they approve of. The x candidates with the most votes will then make it into parliament. I will look into this change in the coming week. We are also thinking about adding an additional notification a day before an election ends to increase voter turnout. Additionally, we want to increase the parliament size for planets with very large populations from five to seven MPs, as the planets have grown quite a bit since the introduction of the politics feature.

To be crystal clear about the rules regarding puppet accounts, we added a new section to the rules called “No puppet accounts”:

Players may not create, use, or arrange for others to create accounts that exist solely or primarily to serve another player or group. Typical examples include accounts set up mainly to vote for a specific candidate or to channel resources to one player or a group of players.

As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!