I personally do not feel we need to change voting reqs currently. I think a lot of the arguments for change were made in good faith, but would be steps backwards or misapplications altogether.
I am open to discussion because keeping an openmind should be an obligation of anyone in a position of power regardless of their own stances. However, voting reqs are designed to be challenging to an extent due to the importance of the vote and the method of attaining them is intended to be as accessible as possible. This is not reflected in some of the proposals I see here.
Suspect tours have been disasterous in most cases and I urge us not to go down this path again. You need a host, you can only cater to certain timezones, and now there is a way for some people to get reqs after 3-4 games total rather than 30+, which is not really fair regardless of the stakes. This does not even mention that with our shorter suspect model, you need to organize it all within 24-48 hours to give people enough notice to have it happen during a peak time such as a weekend; if a suspect starts on a Tuesday or Wednesday and only includes one weekend, then you would need to have the tournaments on Saturday or Sunday, giving little time and lots of room for error.
In general, we divorced voting requirements from tournaments (there also were tournament reqs) in CG OU years ago and going back would be a step backwards to me. The method of obtaining requirements to vote being uniform is a huge plus in my eyes.
One thing I will resonate with: You can easily argue the amount of games required or amount of GXE needed can vary incrimentally from the status quo; I have had a ton of people approach me asking it to be higher after earlier tests and lower after recent tests, for example. Truth be told: I view the current as very attainable and it is intended to exclude some people who cannot reach it. I am sorry this is the case and I have personally been working with numerous people who are close and asking for tips on teams, approach, etc., but not everyone is going to get reqs everytime as otherwise it would be too easy.
I think an ELO cutoff is an ok idea, but it would be a misapplication of the suspect process and I think it sends the wrong message just for the sake of including a few more people (if even). Suspects are intended to gauge competency as opposed to duration of time spent. There is supposed to be disproportionate punishment for losing earlier on or less derailment for losing to someone later on in if they rank highly, which is true in terms of GXE scaling and not in terms of ELO scaling beyond the first handful of games when an account opens. This means that a large part of the competency test is proving that you can regularly beat worse/lower ranked players by design, but not that you can go neutral against slightly better players for a longer sample only to eventually find one streak to hit a certain ELO threshold. Playing a larger quantity of games does not always mean you are more competent and this only has potential to dilute the quality of the voter pool.
ban, please just free ou from forcing half of the teams to run the same mon :(