Endorsement Without New Evidence: How Sequential Voting Inflates Mandates in Online Community Governance

arXiv:2609.09321v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Online communities often treat large support margins in public elections as strong mandates. We argue that such margins can overstate the independent scrutiny behind a decision. Using 198,275 free-text rationales from Wikipedia admin elections, we introduce vote-text divergence, a measure that flags a decisive vote paired with a thin, deferential rationale. Divergence rises as voters arrive later, even after controlling for voter and election fixed effects. The pattern is consistent with information saturation: once prior text is accounted for, arrival order no longer predicts divergence, while accumulated prior evidence does. The effect is strongest among peripheral voters in the co-voting network. Yet divergence does not predict worse post-promotion outcomes, such as administrative activity or survival. Public tallies can therefore weaken the scrutiny signal even while selecting capable administrators: a margin may appear to reflect more consensus and support than it actually contains.

Online voting systems may inflate mandates

Study finds voting margins may overstate consensus

SOURCE     arXiv cs.CY (Computers and Society) (tier 1)
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DOCUMENT   4651395d-9722-4548-9fc8-0dc30f25fbf1
           https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09321
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EVIDENCE   4 extracted excerpts
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MODEL RUN  2 runs, methodology 1.0.1
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SCORE      -50  (Adverse)
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CONFIDENCE 80%