[2021] Welcome your new CSM

The 16th Council of Stellar Management has been democratically elected by the EVE Online community! Please join us in welcoming new and re-elected members that will represent the players and collaborate with us for the next year.

Voting data can be downloaded here.

The forums are a great place! While the CSM is an incredibly valuable resource for us, it is not the only tool on the belt. We regularly monitor the EVE Online forums and various other EVE Media platforms.

In an actual democracy, you can pay people to sign up people who aren’t registered to vote, get them absentee ballots, help them fill them out, and send them in. You can provide transportation to get them to the polls on election day if they need it. In some places you can buy food and water and hand it out to people waiting in line. Some places have same day registration, where unregistered people can walk up to the polls the same day as the election, register and vote.

Generating votes out of thin air is basic GOTV. Here, you need an account that’s at least two months old at the time of the election, and then you’re requiring Omega accounts (which cost money or plex) as an additional gateway to stopping the “generation of votes out of thin air.” That’s a bigger bloc to voting (and would likely be an illegal poll tax in most democracies) than it is a pathway to increased turnout.

And that happened in this election, too. There were multiple opportunities for candidates to debate each other, dozens of shows that had candidates on, and there was nothing stopping candidates from doing videos, commercials or other paid media to get their name ID and support up.

Uh…let me explain to you how “political parties” work.

And yet the claims that elected officials only represent constituents of their political party or ideology are rife.

The CSM elections are as democratic as any other elections I’ve participated in. There are obvious slight differences (no one-person-one-vote) and the position itself has no actual power, but to claim that the process is not democratic requires a hell of lot of willful blindness to what democracy is.