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Good evening,

The elections have shown their final results and I have since they started been working on a complete analysis of what has been happening. The past couple of days I’ve been interrupted by the simple things in life like preventing a war with a neighbouring country, my excuses for this late article. First of all, we’ll take a look at how voting works in eRepublik and what the ideal strategy in voting would be for someone that has picked a party but doesn’t have a preferred candidate. Next, we’ll have a look at the raw results and what this really means for congress. And we’ll end by taking a look at the effectiveness of parties both in their capacity to convince people to vote for them as in the results of an effective strategy.

The way the election module is set up it influences voting and ultimately the results. How does this happen ? After spending several elections observing lead candidates getting way more votes then needed I’ve come to the following conclusion:
A voter is bound to vote for a candidate in the region in which he is residing. As such he might have had a candidate in mind but ends up not being able to vote for that candidate. This will either result in a “party vote” or a choice for a secondary candidate.
A player that votes for a party but hasn’t picked a candidate will usually vote for the person on top of the lists, for parties this choice is often the wrong one as it limits the number of total candidates to represent them in congress. You’re better of voting for someone at random on the list if it’s your intention to support the party as a whole and you do not consult the party forums or voting sheets.

You can find the raw results combined in an orderly fashion per party here. You will observe several things in this sheet, first of all those elected and the 5 that didn’t get elected but also a correction of the votes compared to the provisional votes. These corrections happen due to people using multiple accounts to vote for the same candidate. As this is a general problem during elections, I will remind people that eRepublik laws do not allow you to play with more then one account.

The first important thing to note is that all candidates who are active on the official forum of eBelgium were elected. Why is it important ? Being a congressmember is more then proposing laws in game and voting yes or no or accepting new citizens. An entire section of the forum is dedicated to debate on forumrules, citizen programs and in game law changes.

BfB and TOM seemed to have had trouble gathering a sufficient number of candidates and seem to suffer from a lowered number of strongly involved members. This has resulted for both in an underrepresentation in congress. Above that, 2 of the congress members elected on the BfB list have moved to BCP.

ATO and BCP managed to mobilize their members to vote for the candidates running for congress. Both with great success I might add. I would like to congratulate both for the coordination during the elections.

Another thing to note is that RB managed to get 30% more voters then they have members in their party. Having provided the president and various ministers over the past two months. It was also the only party presenting its candidates in an official article. These two factors might explain for them to be appealing to a broader public then the other parties.