There still appear to be some oddities in the current mechanics of voting influence actions in the Republic and Federation. As an example, in my last vote, the polling situation looked like this:

As you can see, Ecologists are the third-strongest party with 12% behind militarists with 26%. Since I had a lot of anomalies in my Empire, but had already researched all the colonization techs -- making the Ecologist colonization law useless -- I wanted Ecologists to remain the second strongest party. Which was unfortunately impossible.

Paying for the "strong boost" provided by the "Efficient primary elections"-action made almost no difference compared to just going for official support:

Going for the "Strong-arm Lobbying" on the other hand has ecologists becoming the strongest party by a landslide:

In contrast to what the descriptions say, it looks more like the first voting action gives a slight penalty to the stronger parties, whereas the second one gives an extremely strong boost to the selected party. So...two questions, especially for people with better insight into the mechanics or code:

1. Is this working as intended? In particular, this is after researching the technology that strenthens these actions, and after the event that reduces their cost. However, at least the latter only seems to influence "Strong-arm lobbying" which has the cost of 5833, a 1/6 reduction compared to the 7k you would expect at double the price of "Efficient primary elections".
2. If this is not a bug, does anyone feel like the gap between the power of these two actions should be a bit closer? Paying 3.5k dust for basically nothing at all seems weak -- however, getting a party from 12% to about 80% seems a bit strong, especially considering this is not even the UE in which voting actions are (supposedly) even stronger.

Lol 2 years and 78600 upvote points later and still not even an attempt to answer - noone fckn knows how the shtfest that are elections work.
Anyway, look at these for the best understanding:
GamePressure Politics

GamePressure Population
Wayne's World Youtube