Elective Monarchies should be harder to play

About Elective, you do have to note the opinion the electors have of your candidate. While their opinion of you helps, by and large, if the electors don't like your candidate, your candidate will not get elected. Also, opinion from traits is somewhat blunted by the fact that oftentimes, opinion arising from traits only come into play when you have a liege-vassal relationship. Unless your candidate is a liege to your electors, opinion arising from traits will often not come into the picture. Hence, the observation from an earlier poster: If your candidate is not a liege to your electors, good traits won't make them like the candidate more, while bad traits won't make them dislike the candidate. If anything, if your electors have good traits that are opposites of your candidate's bad traits, your electors will dislike your candidate!

Having said that, traits that increases opinion with the opposite sex will always kick in. So, an Attractive, Strong and Gregarious daughter will get elected if you have many male electors. Add to that the usual same-culture, same-religion conditions, and your girl is set to inherit.

Add an extra opinion neg. for those with-in your empire/ Kingdom that is not in the de-jure that does not get a vote increase rebellion from those area's even more while keeping converted / core de-jure happy ( more stable) since they do get a vote. So ex: not only in new area's would you probably have foreigner ( if residents remained not like a holy war that cleans it out), but would also get say.. -50 not de-jure opinion or that might be harsh dunno. just comparing it to infidel/ zealous etc combo.

Dukjlanin said:

I might be doing something wrong but I always have problems with elective. Vassals often change votes as my ruler gets older... so when I first nominate an heir everyone votes for him, but ten or twenty years later, he's either barely squeaking by in the election, or is set to lose, even if the vassals really like my ruler. I've had emperors without a single count or above level character disliking him, but vassals overwhelmingly vote for some random unrelated Duke.

Primo is far more stable and less stressful imo

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kbernges said:

I can never manage to get them to support the heir I want. If there's a duke with at least 15 diplomacy, he's usually preferred over my children.... and without fail, if I don't, they'll always pick the crappiest of my children to support. I even had them elect an Imbecile Lunatic son once over a Just, Kind, Genius son. Though I've noticed more often than not they just vote for my first son over the preferred one. May as well just go primogeniture if elective will unreliably have the same result. So I do.

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I can only conclude you are both, indeed, doing it wrong.

The most likely reason being that you are trying to hold multiple Kingdom titles - each one of which would grant a vassal a vote in the election. Even if they like you a large "Elector titles held" will lead to them concluding the election is rigged.

Elective works best if you are trying to get your heir elected to one, or at most two, titles.