NationStates Jolt Archive

I was just thinking of a potential security flaw in the UN voting system. I don’t know enough of the game’s mechanics to say if this would actually work or not, but what I’ve picked up tells me that it might be a risk. For the rest of this post, I’ll talk about it as though it were real, just because that makes for simpler grammar. Anyhow, it centers around two issues: (1) When delegate voting power is counted and (2) when regional endorsements alter a delegate’s voting power.

To clarify, if delegate voting power is assumed to remain constant during the voting process, then the delegate’s votes would probably be counted at the moment when that delegate votes, added to the total vote tally, and then not updated for the rest of the voting session. Given that, after a delegate has voted, the players who endorsed that delegate could move to another region, endorse another delegate of their choice, and then have that delegate vote with the same boost in power.

I believe that delegate voting power is adjusted at some point during the daily update, and so each phase of this plan would take as much as two days to complete. Since votes seem to take five days on average, I could see this resulting in a clearly malignant doubling of voting power.

So I don’t know if this is an actual problem or not, but I figured it would be good to bring it up in case it is. I don’t want to be patronizing by offering suggestions for a solution (especially since I don’t know coding), but I have some ideas if they’re needed.

The votes counted are the final number of endorsements the delegate has when the UN updates.

As a UN Regional Delegate, I watched those numbers go up and down with my regional support level. Votes only get counted once, regardless of when the initial vote was placed. This is a non-issue.