How late is too late for a prospective mod to be applying?

Question

A good example of this is Mike, who entered the ring about an hour ago.

As I see it, the earlier you enter, the better chance you have (that is, assuming no difference between candidates). As you can see, prospective moderators such as Rocket Hazmat have upwards of 30 comments behind his nomination.

The issue here is, if a user has no clue who you are and has no other subjective information about your performance on the sight, (once again assuming no difference between candidates), they are less likely to vote for you.

Subjective information, such as:

I can attest to bluefeet's judgement from flags, closures, and migrations on DBA.SE! – JNK Mar 1 at 0:59

And other information, such as:

@BoltClock addiction :) Yes I can serve community to moderate threads during Indian time. And can serve best for the Mobile technologies. + I believe in power of community, just for more info i am already serving one community i.e. GDG Ahmedabad but managing it during my spare time. – Bhuro Mar 1 at 6:44

The thing is, without these comments from people like JNK and BoltClock, we wouldn't have so much information about the prospective moderator, and if users can't get in in the to ask these questions, then we have less information, and are hence, less likely to vote for them.

Basically, won't entering an election late have an adverse effect on your score?

One thing to mention though, is that this is generalising in the sense that it assumes you have no prior knowledge of the user and that all the users are equally as good.

Answer 1

I'm not fond of last-minute nominations; I think the time spent discussing candidates and commenting on nominations is extremely valuable, both for the candidates themselves and for the community as a whole.

That said, it's kinda hard to avoid. I wouldn't mind seeing a day set aside between the end of the nomination period and the start of voting for this purpose, but there's no support for this in the current system.

As a work-around, we have a chatroom set aside for this purpose: it'll be active throughout the election process, so feel free to jump in and post questions for or ask questions of each candidate.

There'll also be a structured Town Hall Chat wherein candidates can answer questions posted by anyone who cares to do so - the results will appear here on MSO.

As to the question of whether nominating first or last makes a difference in terms of how likely you are to be elected... I doubt it has much effect. Nomination order is randomized, and voters don't actually see the commentary when voting, so only the most conscientious will see a difference.