To close out each season of Blaseball, thousands of fans flood the site in hopes the Election will bestow upon their team some Blessings. Unfortunately, the current Elections system is deeply flawed, largely because it's so unbalanced, but the developer is aiming to fix this issue.
Throughout each season, Blaseball fans bet on games to earn Coins, then spend them on votes each Sunday during the Election. Votes can be distributed into deciding which rule-changing Decrees go into effect or into roster- and stat-changing Blessings that benefit an individual team.
Blaseball Elections Determine Blessings & Decrees
Decrees can be something mysterious, like "Open the Forbidden Book," or they can be something specific, like "the bottom four teams from last season each take four strikes to strike out instead of three." Sometimes, there is no description at all -- like in Season 5, when the options were only pictures and titles, leaving fans to speculate and vote based on theories alone.
Blessings tend to be clearer, like "Steal the best hitter for your team," but there are the occasional mysteries, like "Make a random character on your team Spicy."
Decrees go solely by majority and the top one or two go into effect. Blessings, however, work based on a plurality: Each individual vote for a Blessing acts like a raffle ticket for that fan's preferred team. Even if a team has the most votes for a Blessing, they are not guaranteed to win.
A Blaseball fan who earns a lot of Coins can significantly sway a Decree or give their team a very good chance at winning an individual Blessing. Since the amount of money an individual fan can earn each week is limited, this encourages fans to help others make Coins in order for the team to be more likely to get Blessings. Likewise, since Blessings are based on chance, more votes means more chances to benefit their preferred team.
Therefore, the Election primarily benefits teams that have more fans, more time and more coordination, but luck is certainly a factor.
In Season 1, there were eight Blessings to be split among 20 teams. The Crabs and the Tigers got two Blessings each, meaning 14 of 20 teams stagnated heading into Season 2. This ignores more complicated factors of the Blessings, like the order in which they activate. The Dallas Steaks won the Blessing to maximize a batter's stats, but after that occurred, the Philadelphia Pies won the Blessing to steal the best hitter in the league. In effect, the Steaks were left empty-handed. A similar situation happened with the Kansas City Breath Mints for their pitcher, Polkadot Patterson, who was stolen by the Baltimore Crabs.
So, four Blaseball teams walked away from Season 1 noticeably better than they were at the start. Season 1 is hardly representative of the game today, but compounding the effects of the first Election with factors that sway current Elections suggests Blaseball is veering close to crisis.
Fans create subcultures for each team. As these teams carve brands for themselves as a fanbase, the draw of a team can become a vector for material support. Blaseball is not too dissimilar from sports in this way. The legendary, winning team gets promising, new talent excited to sign on, which leads to more fans, better players, greater resources and ultimately greater success, which starts the cycle anew.
Diverse subcultures are incredibly important to maintaining long-term health for a game as popular as Blaseball, since it allows individuals to engage with the game how they can best enjoy it. Unfortunately, the disparities have fed back into the game itself.
Why Blaseball Elections Are So Unbalanced
The Miami Dale (represented by the motor boat), have one of the smallest fanbases in the official Blaseball Discord server, with just over 200. As a result, the team has objectively less voting potential than others. Conversely, the Baltimore Crabs have over 1,200 fans in the official Blaseball Discord and have coordinated spreadsheets for voting, as well as income strategies to maximize potential.
To date, the Baltimore Crabs are the only team to have not gone a single season without winning a Blessing. Because of their success in the Election, the Crabs in particular have become the target of fans' rage at inequities, especially when combined with the fact that certain teams like the Yellowstone Magic have not received a Blessing in five seasons.
In the Season 5 Election, several fans were disappointed to learn the Baltimore Crabs had won four of the most powerful Blessings. This followed the Season 4 trend, in which the Crabs won two Blessings with over 50 percent of the total votes in each. The Crabs then won 80 of the 99 games in Season 6 and completely dominated the playoffs, not giving up a single loss. The Crabs again won three Blessings after that.
Notably, improvement cannot be solely measured by number of blessings, since there are a number of non-electoral factors at play in Blaseball and not every Blessing is strictly positive for the team that receives it. For instance, in Season 6, the Crabs inadvertently traded one of their newly-Blessed players for a hitter unable to play on account of being trapped in a peanut shell. But to many fans, variety is the spice of Blaseball, and most believe that even harmful Blessings are fun to receive.
To mitigate these issues, the Blaseball developers have said that they are looking to balance out Elections in the future, but that development turnaround takes a week or two before showing up in the game. Clearly, The Game Band has recognized the growing inequities.
One Decree in Season 7 might ban the top four teams from receiving any Blessings at all in that Election, and one Blessing will steal three players from the Season 7 champion. Another Decree overwhelmingly passed in Season 6, so mathematically eliminated teams will enter what is called "Enhanced Party Time," giving the worst-performing teams a chance to randomly gain stat improvements for their players.
Presumably there are more major electoral changes on the way for Blaseball Seasons 8 and 9. In the interim, many Crabs fans have taken it upon themselves to address the issue. Early on in Season 7, several Crabs fans openly said they plan on changing to other teams just to vote with that team's consensus. This would effectively donate votes to weaker or more stagnant teams.
These are stopgap measures, but indicative that there is long-term hope for Blaseball, even if democracy itself may have glaring flaws.