TAFF 2013: Where the votes came from

On every TAFF ballot (and most ballots for TAFF’s sibling fan funds), there is a piece of text at the bottom that reads something like this:

Reproduction of this form is encouraged. It is the official voting vehicle and must be reproduced verbatim.
Anyone reproducing this form should substitute their name here: John Coxon

A discussion brewed on the mailing list of past and present fan fund administrators over whether this was necessary and whether it was still worth doing, mostly driven by the release of a PDF voting form for the most recent DUFF race administered by Dave Cake and John Hertz. I pointed out that it was useful to be able to track where votes were coming from, but it occurred to me that I’ve never done anything huge with that information. As a result, I asked my co-administrator (the lovely Jacqueline Monahan, who has an incredible amount of patience with my odd requests, last-minute pieces of work and tendency to go off on tangents) to send me the breakdowns for the North American side of the race and I collated the sources of the European side. Hence, a graph!

In this TAFF race the delegate’s continent, Europe, was responsible for 60% of the votes cast whereas the destination continent received around 40% of the votes. PayPal now accounts for around a third of payments made over the course of a race. Europe seems to have embraced PayPal more readily than our cousins across the pond, but PayPal is a significant source in both territories.

Another thing to note is the high number of votes cast at EightSquaredCon. Roughly 22% of the European voters chose to wait for Eastercon to come around instead of using PayPal or the Royal Mail to cast their vote, which signifies that a strong fan fund presence at large conventions is a useful thing to have. However, another 22% of the voters on the European side voted after having been sent a ballot by Jim Mowatt, the winning candidate, which also indicates the strong effect that a campaign that involves sending ballot forms to the potential voters can have on the race.¹

This is reinforced by the fact that almost three-quarters of the US votes came as a result of Randy Byers’ concerted campaigning for Jim, which shows the importance of having someone campaigning strongly for you on the other side of the Atlantic. Candidates that don’t have people campaigning strongly in the destination continent regularly perform poorly; choosing good nominators is a key aspect to winning a fan fund race.

Perhaps all of this (campaign hard, ask people to vote for you, make sure your nominators campaign) is obvious, but I think it’s interesting to see the huge effect that Jim’s campaign had on the race in this instance. Over 40% of the votes can be traced to forms that were sent out by the Jim for TAFF group, which definitely demonstrates that campaigning inefficiently is something that candidates can’t afford to do if they want to win the race.