Council Elections voting turn out

Reps
#1

First of all, congrats to everyone who ran for council this time around, and extra congrats to those who will be joining council.

I really like that the voting portal shows you the voter turn out (what percentage of Reps have voted), however, I feel like the turn out should be much higher for something like this - it’s the governance of an opt in program where activity is part of the agreement to be part of the group. Is there anything we can do to increase the percentage of Reps who vote?

Here are some of my brainstorm ideas:

  • Allow mentors to see if their mentees have voted, but definitely not how they voted
    • As a mentor this would allow me to remind the mentees specifically, and also reach out to them to find out why they’re not voting. Maybe they have questions I can answer, or help them get answers to.
  • Make voting in Council Elections a mandatory contribution, Reps who don’t vote in x number of elections in a row are flagged just like Reps who don’t file a report after a certain amount of time
  • To go along with this, I would make sure it’s possible to “abstain” either by adding a button, or allowing a Rep to rank all candidates as 0. This would give a Rep a way to signal that they are participating and actively choosing not to vote for anyone.
  • Maybe the election cycle is too short for Reps to feel confident in their vote? Or maybe there are other improvements that need to be made to the campaign portion?

What do you think of these ideas? Do you have some of your own?

1 Like
#2

I do agree with Kensie, the percentage is low.
However if you look on the KPI we have 230 inactive reps so we might want to take this into consideration too.

  • I like the idea of the mentors being able to know if their mentees have voted. We already have the button, e-mail your mentee, so this can be a good addition.
  • I don’t think that the cycle is too short, we had 3-4 weeks for this plus a reps call with QA so in my opinion Reps had the time to properly evaluate the candidates and vote. I would love though to hear suggestions for improvement, we always need that :smile:
#3

These elections 241 reps voted (52%) and according to our KPI dashboard we currently have 219 core+active+casual Reps.

This means we were able to get at least 22 “inactive” Reps to vote.

#4

Thanks,

Though I want to be careful that we don’t tell other people that the cycle isn’t too short. It could be too short for some people, and that’s why they didn’t vote. I did feel like it went by fast, but I have a lot of other things going on, too. Which isn’t to say that we could make the cycle longer, we probably can’t, but maybe there are other solutions or tips we can give to reps to make the shorter timeline work better for them.

#5

it is not the cycle ‘before’ the elections but the time you can vote. this time i was online during the time the voting was open but last time i just managed it to go online before the voting closed.

I think it is a good idea to extend the time with at least a weekend in it (during the weekdays is for some people difficult to go online)

just my 2 cents

1 Like
#6

I completely agree with this. I’m in favor of at least one week to vote.

#7

I’ve started this pad so we can keep track of the recommendations - https://remo.etherpad.mozilla.org/voting-turnout

Don’t forget that you can use the like button on Discourse if you like an idea in a post, of course posts might have more than one idea in them, so still a good idea to +1 if it’s in the pad, too.

#8

This is interesting, but I don’t think we can assume that all the active Reps voted. Perhaps Reps WebDev could generate some stats for us so we could see how many core/active/casual Reps voted, and how many inactive Reps voted.

Btw, to see the stats Nuke is talking about you need to hover on the top chart that mentions total Reps. @nukeador can you remind us what are the time frames for core/active/casual/inactive?

#9

These should be the ranges:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute/Conversion_points#Reps

@pierros can confirm if we are using them.