2020 Moderator Election

In September of 2020, an election was held on Code Golf Stack Exchange to select three community members as moderators for CGCC. The election was held due to the increasing backlog of flags and because there was only one moderator on the site at the time, Doorknob. The election began with the nominations phase, where five candidates nominated themselves from September 14th to 21st, followed by the election itself, concluding with results on September 29th, 2020, when hyper-neutrino, Jo King, and Wheat Wizard were elected.

## Election Timeline

### Nominations: 2020-09-14 - 2020-09-21

On Monday, September 14th, 2020, the nominations phase began, allowing users with sufficient reputation and standing to nominate themselves as candidates for the election. Five users nominated themselves:

* caird coinheringaahing (nomination)
* Chris (nomination)
* hyper-neutrino (nomination)
* Jo King (nomination)
* Wheat Wizard (nomination)

### Primary: N/A

The second phase of an election on Stack Exchange is the primary phase. Here, community members with 150 or more reputation can vote in a preliminary phase, where each candidate may be upvoted or downvoted and the vote totals are publicly displayed. Nominations may still be retracted at this point. This is to give a rough sense of which candidates are likely to succeed. At the end, the top 10 candidates proceed to the election phase. Since this election did not have more than 10 candidates, this phase was bypassed, and the election phase began immediately after the nominations phase.

### Election: 2020-09-21 - 2020-09-29

On Monday, September 21st, 2020, the election phase began, allowing users to vote for their top three candidates (with ranking). Each community member with 150 or more reputation was able to vote, and votes were kept hidden (unlike in the primary phase). Results were tallied using the Meek STV method, which is a voting system allowing for transferable single votes with weighting based on ordering.

### Results: 2020-09-29

On Tuesday, September 29th, 2020, the results were posted, and hyper-neutrino, Jo King, and Wheat Wizard were elected. The details of the election and how the votes were tallied are available on OpaVote. Wheat Wizard won with a staggering 54.9% of the initial first place votes and was elected immediately. After transferring surplus votes from Wheat Wizard to secondary choices, hyper-neutrino reached the threshold for election. Finally, after eliminating Chris and transferring surplus votes, Jo King reached the threshold and was elected.

### Significance

Following the events of 2019 leading to a mass exodus of users, including three of the four moderators at the time, Dennis and Mego, and some time later, DJMcMayhem as well, CGCC's activity level steadily plummeted. Initially, the interest check for an election received an extremely negative response, largely due to the circumstances.

However, between January and September of 2020, a surprising influx of new members and activity occurred and the need for more moderation to handle flags also arose. Sites normally have very few restrictions from Stack Exchange in terms of how they function as long as they do not violate its code of conduct and terms of service and are not causing harm to users or the network; however, they must have enough moderation to handle flags and janitorial tasks, otherwise they may be shut down. While it was not explicitly threatened, CGCC was told that being shut down was a potential consideration should there be an inability to fill the moderation positions and handle the flags.

Thus, in September of 2020, almost a year after DJMcMayhem requested that Stack Exchange organize an election to replace him and stepped down, this election was held, and the site's health was able to stabilize and not only handle the uptick in activity, but support new initiatives and events for incoming users and to rebuild the community.

1. ↑ TL;DR, Stack Exchange's mistreatment of a moderator and refusal to accept responsibility and admit fault led to a massive amount of distrust between its community and the company, leading to many users and moderators leaving the network. You can read more about it alongside the rest of CGCC's history in CGCC Blog Post #2: The history of PPCG and CGCC