Voter Descriptions, Demographics etc...

Where do voters stand on policy issues and how much do they approve of extremism. It may be keeping members from joining the game if some are treating it as an accurate political RPG and some are running variants of the Rhinoceros party when they are unsure if such parties will be taken seriously even if attacked on radical positions. If we can get a baseline by region and details on the election rules before the election campaigns get fully underway it would be quite useful.

As far as I can tell, it is a game. Parties that would never be accepted in reality are considered normal, and in fact "normal" parties will probably be seen as boring by most members. I know that I personally love the concept of the SEC, even if they are in opposition to my party.

As far as I can tell it doesn't make sense to have a democracy and a country with multiple millions of people if the entirety of the votes are determined by 20ish active player characters. I can understand having each character represent a good portion of the votes, but if 0% of the votes are assigned through campaigning the entirety of our elections will happen in backroom deals. Even major NPC's don't have votes at this point. Hiring bodyguards probably contributes more to a player winning an election than campaigning because the bodyguards guild becomes more likely to vote for the people who hire them.

Turning the entire election into party with most active players wins unless they get betrayed from inside is a really really ackward way to run a democracy. No campaigning really reduces the interest of the game. We need to find another way to do this.

I see your point... but either way the votes will have to be decided by someone, and why not have the players do that themselves, decide who they would like in power.

Otherwise the only way it would work is for Faustling to do it as the GM, or for him (or someone else i spose) to make a really complicated scoring system based on what campaigning events the party in question does. Which then restricts what each party can do to attract attention to itself. Because no one person could think of every single idea that a party could come up with...

Just let players vote, theres no need to make it complicated....

What can i say, Buying votes works ?

Buying votes only works here because people are actively working to keep the vote totals very very low. We create a realm with over 15 million people in it and have it decided by under 30 votes.

The GM can assign how events work out to a certain degree in secret and we can add stuff in as people want to do it. It's better than having the only campaigning that matters be getting player votes.

It seems like we're running a game that's supposively in a democracy without actually having the democracy part.

How is having one person having a major influence better then 30 people ?

Because that one person is the game master. It prevents representing the best interests of individual characters as the best interests of 15+ million /30 people.
The current system basically bribing/hiring a single player character gets the party over 500,000 votes, and campaigning is only relevant in how it effects existing player characters which for the most part is not at all since people are going to vote for the parties they belong to.

And for my triumphant return, I woul;d just like to make one suggestion:

What if you're not allowed to vote for your own party? I realise this would actually make it a disadvantage to have more than the minimum number of members when it comes to the vote, but in tht case, you will already have the most influence on the board anyway, so something like your party might well get into power.