Actually, chexfan, I don't. Just as long as a member can only vote once, I'm happy.
R.

Yes, very interesting phenomenon. Three times as many votes cast in the runoff?

That is what 20,000 points will do....

How so?

Incentives matter.

Yes, they do. The question is whether they matter for the good or the bad. In this case, I am not certain of the answer.

On one hand, we got a much bigger turnout. Democracy is stronger when more people are involved. On the other hand, the additional turnout was from people who didn't care enough about the election to bother voting the first time around. I have to wonder how many of them knew enough about the issues or the candidates to vote intelligently and how many simply marked off any box just to be eligible for the prize.

Would such an argument have been made had your preferred candidate won? By your logic, if people voted randomly, then the outcome should have been a lot closer.

Actually, I made that argument before the results were announced.

In numbers, the difference does seem big but only because we are used to tiny elections. In percentages, the difference is not that large at all. Scott received 11% more votes than Doc but look how that compares to Gleff's victory over Oz (who took second place) -- 25%.

I am in no way contesting the outcome of the election. Scott won the run offs and I have congratulated him on it and have absolutely no problem with that.

What I am wondering about is whether we should make such an offer again in the future. Perhaps the answer lies in combining the offer with a fairly large minimum post count -- say 1000 posts.

Those with less than 1000 would be allowed to vote but not be eligible for the prize. That would at least guarantee that those who are voting because of the prize have a good knowledge of FlyerTalk.

I understand what you're saying and I'm sure that you're intentions are honorable, but that's starting to get awfully close to a knowledge test in order to vote. And those types of tests have a rather bad history in some parts for being used to manipulate voter rolls.

We didn't make the offer, Randy did. I personally think way too much focus is put on post counts so naturally, I don't think your idea is a good one. No need to complicate the process any further.

Thanks, Randy.

And may I add my own congratulations to this year's crop of five hard-working, dedicated TalkBoard representatives? ^ ^

Particularly with the search function down, it took some time to find the results... (perhaps that is due to my own incompetence, but a sticky would have been helpful)

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to all who participated for volunteering.

Oops.

One FTer who voted in the runoff was selected at random to receive 20,000 FF miles. The point of some previous posts is that a chance to win 20K miles can motivate people to vote, but can't give them the knowledge to vote intelligently. The argument is that the smaller number of people who cared to vote the first time, with no incentive, spent more time studying the issues and the candidates and therefore made more informed choices.

I wonder how this generalizes to "real" elections. The U.S. typically has lower percentage turnouts than many other democracies. Does this mean that only well-informed Americans vote, and that the uninformed people who make up the rest of the electorate in other countries dilute the value of the result? I doubt it.

You know what would be cool: a $10 million "award" randomly given out to one US voter who votes in the next US presidential election.

I wonder how that would affect voter turnout and which party would benefit...might make a fun graduate thesis.