Let us workshop a meta proposal with the goal to extend future election length

Question

The current elections are over, but KRyan raised the issue of "Does a week for Election nominations seem too short to anyone else?" here and got overwhelming support for it. The next elections will come eventually, and we should raise the issue on meta.se where we can make the request and maybe get it through.

To do so, we should workshop a proper proposal, so what should we propose, and what is our reasoning for change - consider the onus is on us when we want to create change.

What are the already rejected proposals such as Could the election period be extended to more than four days?, and how can we present the issue in a manner that others have not done yet?

Answer 1

4-3-2-1 Proposal

Per my Q&A with Slate, I was given the following recommendation for how to proceed:

My advice, I think, is gonna be: write it up how you'd want to see it. But, be clear about the intents at each step, and underlying reasons why you think it would help. At worst, if it's not technically achievable, or if we don't have a way to allocate time to it, having those intents & root causes documented will help guide us to figure out what elections may look like in the future. And if some kind of partial solution is achievable, that might work as well.

With this in mind, I'm proposing the following for each phase of the election process:

0. Election Questions - Proposed Duration: 4 weeks

This may come off as the most absurd duration, however, as a whole our community takes awhile to come to consensus on things. Furthermore, we have seen at least a few times that meta Q&A has one answer that floats to the top almost immediately and then sinks back down after several weeks.

Per the site's overall analytics for the past few months, we see very large spikes in visits primarily on Fridays and Saturdays; and if I had to guess, that's probably game night for a lot of folks.

As such, we likely have a lot of folks whom might be learning about the election for the first time on Friday night and then have to get back to the table or something. If they're not visiting daily, the next time they will get a reminder might be next week.

Giving these folks a few weeks to provide their input on questions might be very helpful for garnering a list of questions that are of interest to them.

There are some folks who wish to make the point that the weekend spikes sync with new visits and those are correct. But that doesn't mean there aren't a significant number of regulars who visit the site during that time frame. Taking the time frame from September 30th through today (November 13th), we see the following increases in site visits over the preceding week's average after removing the new visits:

• October 1st: +2,627
• October 2nd: +5,981
• October 8th: +1,688
• October 9th: +4,461
• October 15th: +1,853
• October 16th: +5,136
• October 22nd: +1,913
• October 23rd: +5,013
• October 29th: +327*
• October 30th: +298*
• November 5th: +2,706
• November 6th: +6,872
• November 12th: +1,637
• November 13th: +4,830

*These values were as low as they were due to a maintenance outage.

1. Nomination Phase - Proposed Duration: 3 weeks

This most recent election had me contemplating on running myself, but a big hangup for me was having enough time for answering the questions. I suspect I'm not the only one in that position, either. Between a very busy work schedule, home life, and other obligations it is often difficult to find a few hours to read, think, and write up responses to questions.

This may mean that I'm too busy to take on another obligation, or it may mean that I need more time to figure out how to fit this potential obligation into my life. Either way, time is necessary for this.

2. Primary Phase - Proposed Duration: 2 weeks

To the best of my knowledge, we've only had 1 primary. However, with the increased time for the nomination phase the plausibility of a crowded field becomes more practical. I don't consider this to be a bad thing, though.

I recommend the 2-week schedule simply because there's a lot of candidate responses to comb through at this point.

3. Election Phase - Proposed Duration: 1 week (2 weeks if there's no Primary)

At this point, the community as a whole is effectively aware of the election and has had ample time to review the candidates' responses. Thus, this is proposed to remain the same 1 week duration as before. This allows those folks who pop in just on Friday night to quickly make their picks and then get back to roll bones against the goblin horde.

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In the most recent election (election 6) 7,510 were eligible. Of those, 1,320 visited during the election (17.5% of electorate). Of those, 719 visited the election page (9.57% of electorate). And of those, only 323 voted (4.30% of electorate). Based on folks showing some interest in the election and those whom cast a vote, there's a significant disparity of nearly 55%.

We may be able to close that disparity by giving those folks more time to provide their input. This may be doubly necessary if they're part of that group whom seem to visit most often on Fridays and Saturdays.

This phenomenon isn't unique to this election, rather it seems to be about par for most of them:

• Election 5: 23% visit site; 13% visit election; 6.3% voted (52.8% disparity)
• Election 4: 33% visit site; 18% visit election; 10.6% voted (41.4% disparity)
• Election 3: 30% visit site; 26% visit election; 12.2% voted (52% disparity)
• Election 2: 40% visit site; 25% visit election; 17.9% voted (27.4% disparity)
• Election 1: 40% visit site; 22% visit election; 16.4% voted (26.8% disparity)

Disparity is defined as 1 minus number of people who visit the election page divided by the number of people who cast a vote.

If possible, I'd like to see this disparity number as close to 0% as practicable. I note that elections where we had the least amount of disparity were those early on and the candidate responses were pretty brief (maybe just a 2-3 paragraphs).

Given the much more extensive responses we expect from candidates, affording voters more time to consider those responses can be helpful for garnering greater participation.

Is this too long a period?

A concern has been expressed that a scheme like this would leave the site short of moderators for too long. On this site, at least, elections have rarely been run quickly to fill a perceived urgent need. Specifically:

Election 2: unknown whether a time-pressure to elect SSD and WaxE was felt--perhaps mxyzplk could chime in?

Election 3: Wax Eagle had been largely inactive for six months before the election; mxyzplk and SSD reported at the time that the site wasn't too much for them without WaxE (but that a broader representation of viewpoints was desirable).

Election 4: SSD and mxyzplk had decided well in advance to step down and did so when SE was able to run an election. (source: nitsua60)

Election 5: doppelgreener and nitsua60 had decided well in advance to step down and did so when SE was able to run an election. (source: nitsua60 and doppelgreener in comment)

Election 6: V2 stolen by SE, Inc.; election was scheduled at SE's convenience and then-current mods relay no urgency to run any faster than that. (source: Someone_Evil & Oblivious Sage, in mod-room conversation of 15 Nov 2021)

Answer 2

Who moderates the site in the meantime?

Some elections happen when everything is great on a site (such as graduation elections). But elections also happen because the current mod team is overwhelmed. It could be the workload increased. But it could also be that a moderator has left. (Under an exceptional circumstance there could be multiple leaving. Hopefully that won't happen again.)

Currently, an election takes about three weeks from the first public announcement. If we more than triple that amount of time, what happens? And that doesn't include the time that it takes between when the moderators ask for an election to when the first official announcement happens. On ELL, moderators asked for an election in January and the election started in late October.

I don't know why it took so long, which makes it hard to know what would work in practice. Is it possible to start the questionnaire well before the election could be scheduled? That would be effective, since any potential candidates know an election is coming and those who want to nominate can start writing their answers in advance, before the nominations even begin.

Though I didn't envision it happening this early as no moderator election is even planned (and the votes seem to indicate others also felt it was too early), there is now an unofficial thread for questions for the next election: Informal 7th Moderator Election Q&A – Question Collection

How to get the jump on nominations anyway

With the assumption that the current system will not be changed, I have some advice from experience: Start answering early. You should be at least thinking of what you will write.

There are two guaranteed questions, as mentioned by the question collection post:

• How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
• How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?

For the other questions, it's a bit of a gamble. On RPG, there were 12 questions that were suggested for the 2021 election, but only a maximum of 8 could be used (chosen by upvotes). While you can't know exactly which ones will be chosen you can get a very good idea, especially as the nomination period draws nearer.

On some sites, nobody asks any questions and they use three other generic questions. This is much easier because that's 5 questions total, and if nobody's posted anything and it's two days before nominations open, it's unlikely a huge influx of questions will happen.

Be warned that your questionnaire must be 12000 characters or less, by default including the quoted questions (but not including your nomination, which is 1200 characters for you to introduce yourself).

I did this for my nomination for the 2022 English Language and Usage election. I followed the question collection post and began to think about how I would answer each new question as it came in. About two days before the election I put the two default questions and maybe 6 of the highest voted questions in a doc and began to write my answers. While I didn't finish writing before nominations opened, I was able to finish up on the second or third day (well in advance of the deadline) and post.

Answer 3

We should not extend the election period.

1. What does it really help? People that don't participate in Meta aren't going to participate given a couple more weeks. The period right now is pretty long given the declaration of creating questions and all, anyone out for 2 weeks can still participate.

2. Elections are usually because mods have left or the mods need more help. Making that process take 10 or more weeks is an unacceptably long time.

I don't see this proposal fixes anything to a larger degree than what it breaks. The duration works for all of SE and we have no real justification for being an exception.

Answer 4

I don’t understand what the counter-argument is.

Without that, I have no idea what we have to debate, what we have to overcome. So far as I can tell, near-everybody on the site wanted it to be longer (even if not necessarily so much so that they wanted an extension in the middle of the election)—so why would this be a problem?

Is there a technical issue, where this is something that’s the same for all sites and making it different on each site is a problem? Do we just need to show it’s worth that much effort? I’m somewhat doubtful this is the case, though, because people pointed out that other elections have gotten extensions, which was confirmed by staff who explained the criteria by which they decide to do that. So that’s not even per-site, that’s per-election at that point.

Is there some concern about the quality of moderation during the interim? Or the workload for the remaining moderators? That was something I’d considered at the time, but none of our moderators spoke up so it seemed to me it was OK.

Is there some belief that a short election is better, as in, more representative of the site? I don’t see how this is plausible, really, but the linked discussion on SU maybe suggests there is something there? Frankly, I can’t even follow the case being made there, it made no sense to me, particularly seeing as it was talking about voting not even about nominations.

But without a sense of the reasons for not doing so, I don’t know how to make a convincing argument for doing so. To me, with the information I currently have, “because we want to” seems like it ought to be sufficient. We need to find out more before we can write a real proposal, which probably means talking to SE directly. I am not sure what the best process here is.