the risk that the results have been affected by off-Forum advocacy and organizing
I’m not sure if this addresses your concern, but just want to clarify that accounts can only vote if they were created before Oct 22, 2024. I think that having to have created an account prior to the announcement of the donation election is a medium bar (at least I think it’s higher than Manifund’s event was) — it’s quite easy to use the Forum without creating an account, so people who create an account tend not to be casual readers.
I do think it would be interesting to compare the overall results with those of the subset of users who have earned at least some karma.
Not really—I think the creation-date rule mostly addresses a somewhat different concern, that of ringers (people who are not really part of the Forum community but join for the primary purpose of voting). This would be—to use an analogy from where I grew up—the rough equivalent of people who didn’t go to a particular church showing up to play for that church’s softball team (this happened, by the way).
My concern here is more that get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts may make the population that voted significantly unrepresentative of the Forum population as a whole. In contrast to ringers, those voters are not illegitimate or shady. However, the results would be slanted in favor of the organizations and cause areas that spent energy on GOTV efforts. So in a sense, I worry that if I defer too much to the results, I am in a sense deferring to organizational decisions on whether to conduct GOTV efforts rather than a representative / unbiased read of the broader community’s opinion.
I’m not sure if this addresses your concern, but just want to clarify that accounts can only vote if they were created before Oct 22, 2024. I think that having to have created an account prior to the announcement of the donation election is a medium bar (at least I think it’s higher than Manifund’s event was) — it’s quite easy to use the Forum without creating an account, so people who create an account tend not to be casual readers.
I do think it would be interesting to compare the overall results with those of the subset of users who have earned at least some karma.
Not really—I think the creation-date rule mostly addresses a somewhat different concern, that of ringers (people who are not really part of the Forum community but join for the primary purpose of voting). This would be—to use an analogy from where I grew up—the rough equivalent of people who didn’t go to a particular church showing up to play for that church’s softball team (this happened, by the way).
My concern here is more that get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts may make the population that voted significantly unrepresentative of the Forum population as a whole. In contrast to ringers, those voters are not illegitimate or shady. However, the results would be slanted in favor of the organizations and cause areas that spent energy on GOTV efforts. So in a sense, I worry that if I defer too much to the results, I am in a sense deferring to organizational decisions on whether to conduct GOTV efforts rather than a representative / unbiased read of the broader community’s opinion.