Posted by Vice Admiral Daniel Lerner (Procedures Guru / Personnel Director / Chief EGO) in Discussion: Role of Assistant Election Coordinator

Posted by Fleet Captain Adam W. (EGO) in Discussion: Role of Assistant Election Coordinator

I’m splitting off here because I have some thoughts about what Daniel wrote that I’d like to explore without derailing any other discussion, because I think he actually raises a much larger topic than he intended to, but that topic is worth discussing.

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2) Allow the AEC to vote at some point if it is determined that they will not need to take over for the EC (24 hours before the end of the election?).

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Point 2: I’ve given a lot of thought about this one, and while I understand the reasons behind it, I believe it is very bad procedurally.

Since the introduction of the AEC, a practice has developed (a good practice) to essentially copy the AEC into every discussion the EC has. The AEC is included in complaint emails, given summaries of issues the EC has identified, given copies of election-related DMs, etc. Why? So that the AEC can do their primary job: step into the role of EC if the EC disappears, and able to do so with an understanding of what has been going on behind the scenes up until that point.

When candidates email the EC, they do so knowing the EC is an impartial and objective decision-maker who isn’t supporting or voting for any of them. There is no need to worry about how things will sway the EC’s vote, because except in very rare circumstances (a straight tie, which has never happened to my knowledge), the EC is not allowed to vote or be partial.

Similarly, the EC is made aware of other issues behind the scenes - issues involving the candidates themselves, issues involving voters, etc. Sometimes this leads to action by the EC. Sometimes the EC believes action is unwarranted, and the rest of the voters will go unware. But we give all of this responsibility and access (I mean informational access, not website/technical/security access) knowing the EC cannot vote.

And all of the above is shared with the AEC during the election in case the AEC has to take over from the EC. Yet unlike the EC, who can only vote in very rare circumstances, the proposal being made here is the AEC can vote in almost every election (i.e. when the EC doesn’t disappear, which to date hasn’t happened as far as I’m aware).

Because of my work, the best analogy I have (and to be fair, it’s not quite correct, but its close) is the whole judge-and-jury trial concept. The judge hears things the jury doesn’t, and then makes decisions on what the jury can be told, when the jury should be told it, and what actions to take to run the actual trial. The jury then makes the final decision at the end of the trial. Now imagine you had a backup judge sitting next to the main judge, and the main judge shares all of their notes, thoughts, etc. with the backup judge, and the backup judge sits in on all arguments the jury isn’t present for. At the end of the trial, a juror is lost - could we just say “well, the backup judge got to hear everything the jury heard, and since we don’t need the backup judge, let’s make them the replacement juror?”. Of course, not.

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I think everything Daniel wrote here makes sense, if you accept the analogy that the Election Coordinator is the “judge” for an election, in that their role is ensure that the process goes smoothly according to the established rules. Part of the rules that we have for elections involve whether or not certain content appears on the boards or is otherwise disseminated, (e.g. on the basis of whether or not it is offensive or otherwise obnoxious), so the idea that the EC might get to hear stuff that the rest of us don’t, and would be required to or inclined to choose to withhold that information, fits very much in line with that whole set of expectations. I think it’s fair to say that the above would be a fairly uncontroversial series of assumptions for STF elections that people typically take as given.

I also think that we ought to not take them as given anymore and revisit them, because I think they’re starting to positively incentivize very bad behavior, which is the opposite of what we want to have happen.

It is not a secret that Election Coordinator is one of the most unpleasant jobs that someone can do in STF, and that a large part of why it is unpleasant is that Election Season brings out the most stupid, petty, and self-serving behaviors in more people than we’d like. We already know this; the club has an Election Coordinator and a series of rules around elections exactly because it is understood that behavior will be unusually bad during this time, and we don’t want to have bad behavior taking place on the boards. Because the Election Coordinator has to review all of the posts, and deal with every complaint that could come from anybody and be about anything that is vaguely related to the election, the Election Coordinator ends up seeing a lot more ugly behavior than the rest of us do. This information asymmetry is by design; the Coordinator is supposed to clean all of this stuff up so the rest of us don’t see it.

The new problem with this asymmetry, is that we have had some people in recent years who have seen it and thought it would be advantageous for them to exploit it by strategically complaining about absolutely everything that they don’t personally like on the Election Ship, regardless of whether or not it actually violates any rules, just because a complaint will produce a response from the Coordinator that they think will be to their advantage. That advantage could be getting a post they don’t like taken down or re-written, but it can also be to just harass people they don’t like in a way that is officially allowed, e.g. a kind of STF version of the SLAPP suit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation )

I think the “judge” metaphor for the Election Coordinator makes this problem worse and actually may even be the primary cause of it; because there is an expectation of informational asymmetry, e.g. that only the Coordinator and only the people directly involved in the complaint will know that there is a complaint, then what follows is a situation where someone deceive themselves into thinking that they will look virtuous in public but can still get away with being petty in private. People capable of such self-deception are also capable of deluding themselves into thinking that they are exceptionally clever and will not get noticed, so proceed to be more petty than they otherwise would be if all of their behavior had to be public from the get go. The result is that a whole bunch of people get harassed privately, but because that harassment took place in an official process that this club approved of in advance, that they have no recourse to stop it and that there’s no proper thing for them to do about it.

I think the solution to this is to abandon the idea that the Election Coordinator should keep certain information private the way that a judge would. It makes a lot of sense for judges to keep non-relevant information private because trials are set up to answer very narrow questions about whether or not specific events took place; information that is prejudicial and also not relevant should be excluded because it makes it harder to properly serve justice. The question an election seeks to answer is “Who should our leader be?” and that is not a question which is similarly circumscribed; people can choose who their leader ought to be according to all sorts of different criteria depending on what their value judgements are. Because value judgements can vary widely, it is impossible to objectively say what is relevant and what isn’t, so it’s better for as much information with regard to an election to be public as possible so that voters can decide for themselves what is relevant.

I think we will have better elections if we know everything that happens during them. We will at least get better behavior, under the theory that part of the behavior we see now happens because there are people who act badly in private but pretend to be virtuous in public. Then again, maybe we’ll find out that we as a club don’t care how people act in public or private, which would be an interesting thing for us to learn about ourselves…

– Joe