A Plea for a Private Ballot

I regularly check tallies before voting. I know for a fact I'm not the only person who does this because I've coordinated GOTV for candidates to help get strategic votes. It's not great, but a tool in the arsenal, and a very common in even if people won't publicly admit it. My experience with this is why I do support private ballot counting.
 
Senate votes are... strange. I will say, this previous Senate field is the very first time in the entire time I've been in Europeia that I've used all of my Senate votes (except for my first vote, but I really had no idea what I was doing back then).

Still, it's difficult to be disingenuous when I have repeatedly seen people mention in eurochat that they voted for whomever the current underdog was just because they were behind. They voted for the score, rather than the candidate. It doesn't matter if it created a run-off or not, it's ridiculous in it's own right, and we shouldn't be allowing it.
 
I regularly check tallies before voting. I know for a fact I'm not the only person who does this because I've coordinated GOTV for candidates to help get strategic votes. It's not great, but a tool in the arsenal, and a very common in even if people won't publicly admit it. My experience with this is why I do support private ballot counting.
To be clear, you're speaking about Aex as the Candidate. I imagine that people are more likely to not check the vote tally before voting if they aren't running or helping to run a GOTV campaign.
Still, it's difficult to be disingenuous when I have repeatedly seen people mention in eurochat that they voted for whomever the current underdog was just because they were behind. They voted for the score, rather than the candidate.
Honestly, have we seen a lot of this? I can't recall ever seeing someone say that more than once or twice...ever.
 
Actually -- arguably, no, not as "Aex the candidate" but as "Aex the campaign advisor" and "Aex the citizen who tends to have views on who I would rather see in office." which I have been a lot more than a candidate over the past year or two lol. I can recall a number of conversations with candidates and just normal "citizens" who endorsed certain candidates or disliked other candidates enough to give the votes they didn't care about to help boost candidates they may not have liked but liked more than someone very close in the running with them. This is especially common in Senate elections where someone very clearly wants to be Speaker, and the best route to that is to try to get as many people in your corner elected as possible.
 
Thats not what Darcness said though. He said voting for the underdog just because they were behind. What you are describing, Aex, is strategic voting. Voting for someone you dont necessarily like or care about so that someone you dont like isnt elected. Thats different.
 
Still, it's difficult to be disingenuous when I have repeatedly seen people mention in eurochat that they voted for whomever the current underdog was just because they were behind. They voted for the score, rather than the candidate. It doesn't matter if it created a run-off or not, it's ridiculous in it's own right, and we shouldn't be allowing it.
Generally, I don’t think “pitty”, this seems like the incorrect thing to call them , votes are something that requires people seeing the tally or not. I’ve tossed a Senate vote to an underdog over say Drecq on occasion without checking the vote tallies first. I don’t think that behavior or inclination would change if people can’t see the tallies.
 
Thats not what Darcness said though. He said voting for the underdog just because they were behind. What you are describing, Aex, is strategic voting. Voting for someone you dont necessarily like or care about so that someone you dont like isnt elected. Thats different.

I'm not responding to what Darcness said?
 
My feeling right now is this: I like the status quo and am sympathetic for the arguments to keep it. But I'm also curious to know what an election would be like without being able to see the results. So, I think I would support a trial run.
 
Yeah, it would be interesting to see in a trial run whether there would be any noticeable effect on the results. I do think, though, that it's very valuable to see the vote counts in Senate elections. In the "no. of seats" poll, you're voting on how selective to be at the middle/bottom end of the race, and I don't think you can make a good decision on that without actually knowing who's in that area. There's little that's inherently better about different sizes of Senate; what matters is who is going to be in those different sizes of Senate, and who isn't.
 
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