Ah, watching all of you discover how more gameplay-aligned governments do things ?
I certainly agree with you, it doesn’t feel right and it’s definitely not representational. However, there is a reason for it in large regions like Game-Created Regions, and a very good one. The basic premise of GCRs is that they are founderless, and therefore subject to coups of the delegacy, which controls the entire region. If Forest were founderless, I can guarantee we would not be doing any open poll to determine our WA delegate. Forums serve a very important purpose in GCR elections — they allow administrators to check the IPs and other security information of users to make sure no one is hiding under an alternate identity and only allow people who are verified as safe both out- and in-character-wise, so no one can rig the elections from outside and stage a coup. In Forest, if the Black Hawks wanted (not saying they would, just using a fairly recognizable group as an example), they could move a bunch of WA puppets into Forest before elections, vote for their chosen Black Hawk candidate, and it would be perfectly legal. Errinundera could void their votes, but in GCRs there’s no Errinundera to do that. So instead they have to use a forum setup where the administrators can make sure to keep any puppets and vote-stackers out. Not ideal, and it certainly doesn’t get anywhere the same number of people, but really the only safe way.
TSP does something a little bit extra which I do like a lot for delegate elections — the forum votes for the candidates, and then instead of the winner immediately being chosen, the top two are sent to a regionwide gameside poll for all WAs to vote on. That way more people get some say, but both candidates have been vetted security-wise first.
Yggdrasil really has much less necessity to do voting off-site, it’s probably more an organization thing. I don’t quite understand that though.
