We've made a overhaul to the referee election process that we hope will solve a number of issues we identified with our initial roll out. These changes are in effect and will be used to determine the first 9 referees as of the December 1st snapshot.
The first major change is that we are now requiring all candidates for referee to have a Discord account and to register that account to their referee Steem account. One thing that we've found in our initial testing with the early group of referees was that for them to accomplish the mission they needed to be able to stay in contact with one another. We've now adapted the role of Referee within Discord to be assigned on the results of the election snapshot. This will give the elected referees a private staging room to discuss content and view any anonymous reports that are submitted for review.
Beyond using a new medium this is actually quite a major change to the elections. When we initially rolled out the elections we allowed stakeholders to nominate anyone they wanted to assume the role. This created problems when users who had no intention of being a referee were being moved into the top 9 spots. To alleviate this problem we will now only count votes for users who have verified that they do indeed want to become a #SportsTalk Referee. Stakeholders will still be able to vote for anyone they chose but only votes cast for users seeking the role will be tallied in the snapshot.
Verification for #SportsTalk Referee is now initialized within Discord. To verify for the role of a referee first join the #SportsTalk Discord. Then write a post on sportstalksocial.com in which you introduce yourself and explain why you would be a good choice as a referee. Once your post is published go to our Discord and open the #verify channel. In there use the following command to verify your candidacy:
!verify @YourSteemRefereeUsername URLforSportsTalkSocialIntroduction
After you send that message the SportsTalkSocial Discord bot will respond to you with a Steemconnect link for you to sign with your referee account's keys. Once you've signed this transaction then you're account will be verified and linked within the election system to your chosen Discord account. This account will be the one used if you are elected as a referee.
We've had reports of issues with votes not updating. This has stemmed from issues with streaming incoming Steem blocks from the prior node. We've now updated to a new node for better reliability for identifying your votes. If you find that your vote has not updated please let us know in the #SportsTalk Discord.