2018 Election Controversy

The 2018 Election Controversy was a serious of controversial events that surrounded the first council elections in June of 2018. The controversy prompted the Government to reform the record keeping system of the Parliament.

## Events

After the first President of Festdidgea was elected, it was suggested that a council be elected to form the Parliament of Festdidgea. The process of council elections began by a public call for candidates by the President. It is believed that 5 people nominated themselves as candidates and entered the running for election. At this point, the council was planned to be made up of 4 people.

The process of voting was an online system where every citizen would have 4 votes, meaning that the candidate with the least votes would not win a seat on the council. After several days of campaigning, the election took place around the beginning of June. On the same day as the election, it was found that a candidate, ButtBandit, had received more votes than should have been possible. The President was the first to discover this and thus called the election off. The President was then accused by an other candidate, Munkman, of being behind the election tampering. These accusations were made as the President had previously stated openly that he hoped ButtBandit won a seat on the council as the President believed he was the best option for Head of Military.

These accusations seem to have been held by only a small amount of the Festdidgean population, as many saw the fact that the President himself questioned the numbers of the election and called the election off as proof that he had no part in the tampering.

It is also believed by many that there was no tampering at all, and the problem with the election was due to a number of things such as; the electronic system being used for the first time and users were not well-versed in how to use it, poor communication in regards to the voting process, and multiple voters using the online voting system from the same IP address in an institution with poor internet.

After these events, the President decided that the council elections would be held again, but this time using paper ballots to avoid any more issues with numbers of votes. It was also decided that the council size would be decreased to 3, as 4 was thought to be too big for the size of the population. 1 candidate dropped out, although this was not believed to be due to the new number of available seats, and rather was due to their lack of votes in the previous failed election.

This election had no problems in regards to number of votes, but resulted in a controversial tie-breaker between candidates ButtBandit and Munkam. Every citizen except one, who happened to be the sister of the President, had voted. The President stated before the election that his sister's vote would not be counted if there was a difference greater than 1 of votes between the candidates with the lowest and second lowest amount of votes, as in this situation, if the voter allocated one of their four votes to the candidate with the lowest votes, the candidate with the second lowest amount of votes would still have one more vote than that of the candidate with the least amount of votes. The election however, did result in conditions where 1 vote could have swayed the outcome, so the President declared that his sister's vote would have to be counted.