Voting for the 2025 Donation Election will open on the 24th November, and close on December 7th. 

Anyone with an account that existed before the 24th October will be eligible to vote. If you aren't eligible, you can still influence the vote - check out how to contribute in other ways. 

We'll use a ranked voting (I've already apologised to Brian). The voting portal will look like this:

You will rank the candidates (1, 2, 3, etc…) in order of preference, with no need to rank all candidates^[1]. You will be able to change your vote as many times as you like before the deadline.

The system for adding up the votes is very similar to the ranked choice/instant runoff system that is used in some political elections^[2]. The votes will be aggregated in the following way:

1. Add up everyone’s 1st choice to get a count for each candidate.
2. If there are more than 3 candidates with any votes, eliminate the least popular, and redistribute those votes according to the voters' next favourite choice. There can be last-place ties at this stage. In that case, we use a random tie-breaker.
3. Repeat step 2 until there are only 3 candidates remaining.

This will result in 3 winners with a vote count for each of them. The money will then be distributed proportional to this final vote count (e.g. 305, 201, 157 votes respectively will mean the pot is split 45%, 29%, 26%). You can see last year's winners here. 

Viewing the running count

The running total will be visible while voting is open (once 100 votes have been cast). This will appear on the Frontpage banner like so:

By default only the top 3 (expected winners) will be shown. You can expand to see the vote count for lower ranked candidates, which could be useful for tactical voting (e.g. switching your top vote to a candidate that is just about to make it into the top 3).

The meaning of the vote counts when you expand beyond 3 is a bit subtle, it effectively “un-eliminates” the next best candidate. This could result in slightly confusing behaviour like the top candidates changing order in the leaderboard.

The reason for this behaviour is that eliminated candidates have their votes reallocated (as explained above) to more popular candidates, so un-eliminating one to display it on the leaderboard removes these votes from the more popular candidates.

Voting norms

The visible leaderboard in the banner means that users will be able to vote tactically to try to change the leaderboard.

This election matters– real money is being distributed, and the EA Forum will be promoting the winners after the election. So we are going to be watching out for bannable voter fraud, and suspicious voting behaviour. To be clear on what we mean by this:

What’s allowed

• Tactical voting: Your vote doesn’t have to represent your true preference order. Perhaps you see that the candidate that is currently in 3rd place seems a lot worse to you than the candidate that is in 4th. In that case, you are free to change your vote to put the 4th place candidate in 1st (even if they wouldn’t be your top choice).
• Changing your vote: You can change your vote as many times as you like until the deadline.

What’s not allowed

• Double voting (bannable): If you have multiple accounts you may only vote from one of them.
• Vote brigading (can be bannable):
  • Everyone is encouraged to:
    • Write posts that argue the case for particular organisations or projects, and attempt to explain to the Forum audience why they should vote for them.
    • Share the donation election on social media or slack, and tell people to check it out.
  • However, we will be watching out for large groups of people voting for their own organisations, or other attempts to mobilise blocks of votes by means which are not rational persuasion^[3]. We reserve the right to nullify votes if we see suspicious behaviour.
• Vote sniping (unsporting): We don’t want to see the ranking change drastically in the last few moments of the election, as voters tactically wait for the last minute to vote. This would mean far less time for the Forum to have mind-changing discussions. To avoid this, we aren’t sharing the deadline for voting. Votes will end at some point on December 7th^[4].

How to contribute in other ways

Comment on the Donation Election discussion thread: We will have a discussion thread pinned to the top of the Frontpage (see last year's). When you vote, you’ll be prompted to leave a comment to be crossposted there. You can also engage with the comments and discussions on the thread at any time, and in fact, I encourage you to. A lot of the valuable discussion during the Donation Election is likely to happen there.

Post something: You can use this tag for Donation Election posts. As I said, I expect that most discussion will happen on the discussion thread, but this doesn’t have to be the case. Perhaps you’d like to:

• Make a poll and host a debate on something you think is a crux. For example "on the margin we should support wild animal charities over farmed animal charities".
• Make a cause-prioritisation argument which could shift Donation Election voters wholesale towards a particular cause.
• Make a full argument for your favoured candidate.

All of these could be valuable Donation Election posts. If you’re unsure whether your post idea is suitable for the Donation Election, as always, message me.

Donate to the Donation Election Fund: Donating to the fund will make the election more exciting, for Forum users and for the organisations taking part. Depending on how much you donate, you could also be eligible for rewards, for you or for everyone.

1. ^{^}

     Unranked candidates will never get any points from you, so it’s technically a lower preference than putting a candidate last (although more likely you just don’t have an opinion)

2. ^{^}

    The one difference is that in political elections, the result is decided when an elimination round gives one candidate >50% of the vote, whereas in this case the result is decided when all but 3 candidates are eliminated.

3. ^{^}

   For example, an organisation sending out a newsletter with a 'vote for us!' link, or posting on social media or slack with the same. Please message me if you're unsure whether the communications you are about to share would count as vote-brigading. 

^{^}

We've already decided on this time internally, and those with knowledge of the deadline have committed not to vote after the evening of December 6th. 

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