[governance] Criterion for charter voting

[Jeremy Malcolm]

On 29/09/2010, at 8:58 PM, Avri Doria wrote:

> Having just voted in an election, one could argue that the conditions of the charter had been met.  Interesting cascade.
> 
> And on the spirit, this happened so quickly, within the two month margin for voting on an election, we can be confident no one joined the mailing list to mess with the charter.
> 
> So we might have both letter and spirit.

Exactly.  That was my reason for doing it this way.  Whilst I agree that it is a question of interpretation as to whether one can interpret "voting 30 seconds ago" as having "voted in the previous election", it cannot be questioned that if you vote in the election one day before it closes, you can vote again in a charter poll that is called the following day.  So - 30 seconds, or one day - what difference does it make?

Don't forget that we are pressed for time here.  Unless the charter is amended, we will be unable to legally nominate any civil society representatives for the CSTD working group on the IGF.  Further, the longer delay between election and charter vote, the less time the nominating committee will have to deliberate.

Having said that, if there is a clear preference for Adam's solution, whereby I would disqualify voters from all the 2010-eligible members if they were not also 2009-eligible members, then we can proceed that way.  This is technically possible, and will save us the time (and aggravation to people who have already voted) that we would otherwise waste by duplicating the poll in 10 days time.

However, my reason for avoiding doing this was that there was a shadow over the validity of the 2009 membership list, that was never completely resolved (and frankly, probably now cannot be, since the person who ran the last election was unable to find the time to do the necessary investigations - and he was always volunteering his time after all).

So my first preference is that we accept both the coordinator election result AND the charter vote as valid, but I have encouraged Parminder to let the Appeals Team decide if this is unacceptable to him.

My second preference is that if there are a sizable number of people for whom the first option is unacceptable, and if it this would overcome their concern and Parminder's, I will filter the results of the charter poll through last year's membership list (notwithstanding the problems with that list).

My third and least preferred option is to run the charter vote again after the coordinator ballot closes.  I would need an Appeals Team decision on this before proceeding, because of the delay it would cause to our selection of the CSTD panel.

-- 
Jeremy Malcolm
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Consumers International
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