Hey folks, I can see a couple questions here, I'll cover off what I can and please, ask if I've not adequately covered it in this or my post in the voting thread.
In terms of people representing charities, there's no difference in policy for this nomination period or any before it - the key thing is that if you work for a charity or represent them in any way, you must disclose it. Several people nominated a charity this time around, and said that they worked for them, and those nominations were of course taken into account. There were also nominations by people who said that they wanted to support a charity and didn't disclose that in fact, they had an affiliation with the organisation. That's not being genuine, that's trying to manipulate our community, and the nomination was discounted as a result.
In terms of removing nominations, I wouldn't expect you to come up with the same figures that we are unless you had access to the same level of information that we do about people's accounts. What I don't know how to do is to provide you insight on these checks without compromising people's personal information, or putting someone in the firing line - even talking about the kinds of information we use to do these kinds of checks could make it easier to evade in future, and the last thing I want to do is let anyone trying to manipulate the community sneak past. I'm really sorry that it's meant some of you feel like your nomination hasn't been taken into account, here - if you know that you aren't doing anything suspect, then your nomination was counted.
Double-voting - I can see why you'd be alarmed, and that's why it's taken until the afternoon to reply here. I've been checking into it with the comms team, who operate the web app, and there's a couple of things at play. First, it shouldn't be possible - it's coded not to be. If you've voted and try to vote again, it should take you to the thanks screen and skip the vote screen. However, we're seeing that that isn't working on some browsers, so if you're seeing that behaviour, I'd love to know your device and browser configuration so we can see if it's something we can address. Of course, because each voting link is unique, we can easily track if someone has voted more than once, mistakenly or deliberately, and discount the extras that were submitted on that link. I'd love your steer on whether we should take the first vote or most recent vote in that case.
In terms of Crisis being included or not within the nominations, that's an interesting one. They didn't make the shortlist this time, and if they had, I think I'd have wanted to do a greater consultation with the community as to whether they should, based on what you said in the nominations thread. It's a tricky one, because while we have the exclusion criteria in place, the nominations from other members are also a great indication that they want that charity to benefit, regardless of an any exclusions. I'm not sure what the answer is here, but I'm confident we can come to a conclusion together.
If you have multiple legitimate accounts on a single email address, you will get one voting email to that address - that's because we don't want people who have lots of accounts on the same address skewing the vote, like people who operate accounts for their families, or the way some super recruiters operate. I'll happily get the team to send out a voting email to anyone who's got a second account they need an email for 🙂
