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The last election saw the first 'national popular poll' for President.

I'm on record as saying it was unnecessary. I stand by that. However, it's always good to look at new technologies so we can determine usefulness or uselessness using metrics.

This is really just a data dump so I won't throw too much of my personal interpretations into all of this, but looking at the results it seems like those who really WANT to use this poll (6th parties) voted in combined force relatively equal to the Top 5's that chose to participate. Since they aren't an organized force, it seems like an easy compromise to have 6th parties use this polling system and act as the '5th vote' in the 'majority of primary wins' Unity process. Then they have equal say as the other parties.

Something to think about.



Now for data.

The turnout for the popular poll wasn't that great, despite all of the shouts, buying votes to drive polls into the Top 5 articles of the day, posting on private forums (the Feds did, anyway) and posting in a variety of articles. Fewer Top 5 members voted in this popular poll than they did in their party primaries, however with Cerb being such an obvious candidate and the other two candidates being late entries that hadn't campaigned, this isn't terribly surprising. It was 'just for appearances' anyway.



The security measure for this poll was to simply grab a list of the people in the AFA and exclude them from the poll. The problems with that method were obvious right away. All they have to do is change parties and their vote will be counted. Or if they are already hiding in another party, they will be counted. There was one AFA member that switched their affiliation and switched back immediately following the poll. There were 2 more 'bad guys' that are sitting in other parties more long-term. Additionally, our ATO candidate in the AFA was excluded because of the affiliation.

Easy enough fix here. With the new efforts to put together a really cohesive and comprehensive Homeland Security office, we should be able to exclude individuals that have been flagged, rather than excluding entire parties. That's only a slightly more complicated process and there will probably be people falling through the cracks for a little while, but these are efforts that must be made if this polling process is going to be used either on the national level as the main unity primary system, used as a backup in case of a tie or for the 6th parties and unaffiliated people.

Additionally, there were other technical issues with the polling process. Things being counted that shouldn't have, and other things not being counted that should have. I won't get into the details there (security), but the tech guys are working on this as best they can. As of right now, this poll is not more secure than a forum poll. If you say to yourself 'but forum polls are totally not secure'...yeah. This is less secure than THAT. However, with so little on the line, there seemed to be little reason to really mess with this poll this month. We have to keep working on this if a national poll, this method OR the forum, is going to replace party primaries.



The question has been whether or not it is fair for members of the Top parties to determine candidates for the entire country. Even with low turnout among top party members, they still made up more than 70% of the vote. Additionally, We The People opened their door to 6th party members, so some of the 6th parties who voted in this poll had already voted in a top party primary. MOST of the people who voted in this poll had already voted in a party primary, and the results were essentially the same.

You can take this to mean the poll is relatively equal to the party primary system (although less secure) or you can take this to mean that the party primary system isn't as flawed as people think it is.



What I found personally interesting was that 6th party members combined had almost the same turnout as the Fed party, and better turnout than the other Top parties. There has been talk time and time again about putting together some sort of 6th party coalition and try and get people organized in some way without making them give up their small party homes. Those are the statistics that show how powerful such a group could be.



When it's broken down by individual small parties, the picture looks very different. Of the 6th parties, Vox Populi had the most participation, by far. Well, I say 'by far' but it is literally 7 people. Total. That is equal to the number of voters who have no party affiliation at all. There were 37 total people who voted from outside of a top party, spread out across 11 different groups.



Vice President Inwegen has announced that he is going to oversee the discussions on a Unity primary system to help find one that works, makes sense, is secure and keeps us moving forward instead of wearing us down.

It's no easy task, but hopefully we crack down and win this war so we can go back to normal elections soon.