During the election, the choice is not properly saved in Ballot

Question

I am voting to the current moderator election here but when I modify the Ballot position event the box is saying "Selections saved" after the 5 seconds delay, if I just refresh the page, my last modification is lost.

I initially did the same and did not get the badge until Yesterday when by chance my vote has been really saved.

This is quite annoying as I do not know if my selection is really effective and time consuming if I have to redo it several times.

I am not sure if I missed some action but I scroll all the page to find if there is a button to force the save of the selection and found nothing. I assume the Ballot box is taking the votes after the 5 second delay.

I am using Google Chrome Browser from MAC OSX 10.15.7 (Catalina).

Update: steps to reproduce

After seeing the answers, I arrive to the conclusion that this is the "Undo" user which seems to have the bug.

If I clean the Ballot by removing all Jeff Schaller, after 5 sec the ballot is really empty (and saved). Now if I want to vote for "Undo", and put only him in the Ballot (position #1), after 5 seconds the ballots say "saved" but when I refresh the ballot is still empty. If I do this for Jeff Schaller, the selection is saved, but I cannot put "Undo" in the ballot in 2nd position as well.

Answer 1

Okay - we've fixed it. Thank you for bringing up this issue.

The bug only happens in a very specific set of super unlikely circumstances: we were mistakenly checking the Id of a nomination against the Id of a user (instead of comparing UserId to UserId), and when those overlapped, that user's nomination was incorrectly marked as withdrawn. It was never caught because this situation is remarkably unlikely so we weren't able to find any issues while testing.

This has some ramifications for this election, so look out for a post from a Community Manager (probably V2Blast) coming soon with more information.

Answer 2

Replication steps:

1. Drag Jeff's name to "Drag Next Selection Here"
2. Drag Undo's name to same location
3. Wait for Pending Save count down to complete

This causes the following:

• POST is sent to https://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/election/vote-moderators/ with the following payload (I censor'd my fkey) fkey=CENSOR&electionId=1&candidateIds%5B%5D=743&candidateIds%5B%5D=1
• A response is received with the following: {"Success":false,"Message":"Voting not allowed for withdrawn candidates","NewScore":0}

Answer 3

Per my comment, the devs are having some trouble reproducing this issue:

• If a user has ranked the candidates by dragging the selection into the "1. (Drag next selection here)" area, then it seems like those votes do get saved.
• However, if you don't drag the candidates up into that area, then there won't be any selections saved, even though the system shows a message that the ballot has been saved.

Can those of you experiencing this issue confirm that you're dragging the candidate names into that numbered-list portion of the ballot ("1. (Drag next selection here)", etc.)?

If you do so and are still experiencing this problem, please post a response with any relevant details that might help the devs dig deeper into the issue.

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If those experiencing this issue are able to respond, the devs can continue looking into this issue.

In the meantime, the voting phase of this election has been extended by 1 week. That will allow the devs more time to resolve this potential bug, and hopefully ensure that the community is able to successfully vote in the election.