The validity of the moderator's election : Is it deteriorating?

Question

I've been wondering recently why you guys here do not pay due attention that there are sooo few voters who actually voted albeit that there are so many eligible voters.

This is happening at ELL also, but I refrained from commenting there, since it seems they seem to be thinking they are "untouchable".

So far, I've been not so active at SE, but since the notification for this election came, I voted. But,

1,299 voters were eligible, 368 visited the site during the election, 270 visited the election page, and 128 voted

Think, only 10% out of 1299 eligible voters cast the ballot.

Are you doing the election for the election sake or just don't worry about this problem? As far as I experienced, even at the highly populated ELL the same phenomenon occurred.

This means almost entire participants are not interested in who the moderators are. My personal suggestion is if the voting outcome is lower than 25-40%, the election itself should be doomed to be nullified.

See the history of the popular vote for presidency. Even the honorable G.H.W.Bush garnered 37.4% from Republicans who lost to Clinton in 1992.( Lowest after WW2. )

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I am afraid it may be I should not have used the political statistics. But my question even became larger than before after checking/comparing with the last year's election.

According to 2017's election.

1,023 voters were eligible, 297 visited the site during the election, 234 visited the election page, and 107 voted

So on the contrary to one of the answerer's claim, the "eligible" voters increased by the number of 276, while the actual final voters increased only the small margin by the number of 21.

So the increment ratio is 107/1023 = 10.3%, which is even larger than this year's final outcome numbers / eligible numbers, which is 128/1299 = 9.8%. ( Interestingly, last year, the number of people who visited the site is almost close to the number of the people who visited the election site. ( This year, the difference widened. )

One of the answer says these so called "sleepers" are physically dead or left, but the statistics show the contrary. The site has become more active but the people who are interested in the election decreased as I mentioned above.

And as I surveyed about the ELL election, I found out this problem is deeper than I or we thought.

In 2016 election

869 voters were eligible, 274 visited the site during the election, 235 visited the election page, and 120 voted

There were only 869 eligible voters. And the real outcome / eligible ratio is 120/869 = 13.8%

However, in 2018 election,

3,294 voters were eligible, 1,087 visited the site during the election, 749 visited the election page, and 367 voted

Within only 2 years, "eligible" voters increased by the number of 2,425, almost quadrupled!, but the voting outcome / eligible ratio decreased, which is 367/3294 = 11.1%.

So the "sleeping or dead or left" answer is a complete lie, the SE has become more popular, though people who are concerned about who the moderators are decreasing.

I'd like to warn current standing moderators or communities pay serious concern to this issue in order to maintain moderators' credibility.

Thank you.

Answer 1

TL;DR

If we analyse what the figures would mean in terms of political elections, one can argue that we have a voting outcome of 47.4%, which really is not too bad.

Longer answer

368 visited the site during the election, 270 visited the election page, and 128 voted

This is the crucial part of the information, since the biggest number should not be of much interest, really. Let me rephrase the numbers in terms of "normal" elections to explain why:

1,299 voters were eligible

1,299 is the number of all users that achieved the reputation threshold for voting and are not deleted/suspended. This includes all users who have not visited the site for years. If you like, you could say that for political common elections, it is like including people who emigrated or died (some users counting here literally are dead by now) but were voters once. Nobody does that.

368 visited the site during the election

This is the number of potential voters still around, even if they really just checked a question without visiting the election page - in a way, the potential ballot of people that could vote if they did what formally is demanded from them.

270 visited the election page

The corresponding number in the American voting system would be "registered voters", i.e. those potential voters that did care enough about elections to at least do something and take a look into things. Mind, the election page has been up for longer than the election phase proper and probably many of them were there during the nomination phase.

and 128 voted

This is the number of "registered voters" that actually turned up and cast their vote in the time frame where it counts.

Now, the voting outcome in the American system is calculated as a fraction of registered voters - not what I called "potential voters" - if memory serves, which in this picture would be a respectable 47.4 %.

Number crunching and facts in the face of the edit

Before getting into the numbers, I would like to tell you that you essentially are in a witch hunt here. The internet is a fast-living place and servers are not forgetting anything.

Eligible voters

The number of eligible voters increased by 27.0% between elections

What are "eligible voters"? As stated above, it is every registered user that reached 150 reputation points (and is not suspended). Unsurprisingly, this number increases as inactive users do not stop having 150 reputation when they are not around anymore.

In all seriousness: Most increase (esp. on ELL) will be by people with the 101 rep points association bonus that contributed one or two answers in a HNQ (Hot Network Questions) bar question or users that asked a single or set of very good questions sparked by some current problem in their lives, i.e. users that visited the site a few times due to a single occasion and were never seen again.

Visited the site

The number of distinct accounts visiting increased by 23.9 % between elections (including sockpuppets).

You also seem to have the misunderstanding that "more eligible voters" automatically means "more participation/traffic". This is - in fact - wrong. The weekly visits on this site are fairly constant at about 45k since February with only a slight increase within the last few weeks (no earlier numbers available; this number is from the site analytics). The average number of posts per week is fairly constant for well over a year.

Looking at the numbers, we have two inferences to make here: Firstly, the increase of users with 150+ reputation points is not met by the increase of distinct accounts visiting the site. Secondly, as the number of "gross visits", i.e. what I take to be "site access with login" is overall fairly constant, the average number of visits per account is decreasing.

In other words: Not only the number of accounts with 150+ reputation points is growing faster than the number of accounts actually accessing the site, i.e. the fraction of active accounts is declining, but there is also an additional trend of each account that is active being less active in the average, i.e. visiting the site and posting less regularly.

Closing remark

These are the facts. It is not a "lie" that "eligible voters" includes every user that ever registered on the site and reached 150 reputation points (including 101 rep association bonus!), it is a fact. Hence, taking this number as a reference point for voting outcome is questionable. What we definitely can see here is that StackExchange sites have a strong tendency of losing members that did actively contribute as active contributors so that we experience a growing number of prolific, but now unused (or less used) accounts, which in itself is problematic.

On the other hand, this is completely normal for every single internet community out there. Lives and interests change, so people move on. Demanding that they should care about an internet community enough to vote - which presupposes they at least visit the page in the first place within the 22 days of the election period and additionally within the last 8 days to cast their vote - is unrealistic and runs against the facts.

Answer 2

The rules would determine if the election should be nullified or not. I assume there was no problem with the turnout or we would have heard about it by now.

I suspect the 1,299 eligible voters includes people who are no longer active, but who have been active in the past. I don't think they should all be counted as current users.

So the active users are among the 368 who visited the site during the election. I suspect some of these people accidentally dropped by, the way I did for the Math SE election recently. I voted there, but I am not really active there. We probably need to know more about those 368 people. How many times did they stop by during the election period on average? How many times did they vote on a question or answer on average? How many times did they post on average?

Assuming we count all of them, that would give a 128/368 = 34.8% turnout. The town home association I am a member of requires that only 20% of the homeowners vote at the annual meeting. I have to go around knocking on doors to make sure we get an adequate number of proxy votes to hold the annual meeting, so 34.8% is not all that bad.

On the other hand, I did expect to see more people nominate themselves for this position, but that's the way it is.