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Re: [atlarge-discuss] Poll watcher rights and duties

At 05:03 a.m. 10/04/2003, espresso@e-scape.net wrote:

At 16:27 +1200 2003/04/09, Joop Teernstra wrote:
>As for "disenfranchising" members who cannot access the web, I do not
>agree.
>This is not disenfranchising, just (perhaps) slightly increasing the
>burden
>of voting.

Since we do not in fact know which of our 1000 members have what
kind of Web access when, I think "just (perhaps) slightly" is
an unwarranted assumption.
We have tried both methods, and the assumptions are based on the outcome.
All members (except Vittorio's 17) received an email and if web-voting would have been a huge burden for many who *wanted* to vote, they could have used the email options (reply to the sender or subscribe to the ML) to express their frustration.

As I've said, answering all the
questions in the recent poll and writing a few short comments
took me nearly 2 hours using dialup.
If many others had the same complaint, it would have shown up in the comment lines.

Meanwhile, people depending
on the City of Montreal's free public access terminals in a
public library get to book a 1/2 hour of access two days in
advance.
Your concern for the poor is laudable. But how long do you want your argument to hold up the elections for this basically self-selected group of people who are interested in ICANN governance issues?
These people have said they want structure and elections.

If that's the case here, how do you *know* that people
located outside urban centres with public access terminals
in countries with very reliable phone lines or cables won't have
a problem?
Neither of us *know*. Such issue can be debated forever, but respect for a majority vote allows us to move ahead.
Inclusion (of everyone) should follow, not lead.

>As most members are not contributing anything else, and they are not
>asked
>to cross a mountain ridge to walk to the polling place, I feel (along
>with
>76 vs. 21) that the web is the preferred place to practice democracy.

In effect, you are saying "if they haven't enough access time to
follow long and fairly unproductive discussions on this mailing
list, or if they do have to cross a mountain ridge to walk to
an Internet café, it doesn't really matter since we who have
easy access prefer the Web." To me, that seems like a curious
attitude for an organization which claims it will represent
the interests of all Internet users in promoting democractic
governance.
I did not say that, and the innuendo of "curious attitude" is for your account.
The fundamental issue is: What is "democracy" if it does not involve a majority deciding?

Democratic governance is promoted by the fact that we are open and that our leaders are not appointed but elected.
But our membership is self-appointed and that is something we cannot change.

The best we can do is to abide by the majority wish of the self-selected voters among our self-selected members and create a meaningful umbrella organization that can speak to ICANN with the force of numbers behind it.

>Please ponder what Jan said:
>"Demanding perfection at this stage is to force us out of existence.
>"The
>best is the enemy of the good." The means of security should grow
>organically as the organization grows."

I agree completely with Jan and don't expect the impossible.
However, given that
a) we have the possibility of choosing amongst several
   reasonably-secure methods of conducting an election

I hope so.


b) we have evidence that only 10%-or-so of the membership
   did in fact vote in the Polling Booth but no means of
   knowing why the rest didn't
c) we know that at least triple the number of votes were
   cast in the previous election


Nowhere near "at least triple".
The last email vote (on the domain name), returned 159 valid votes.
The most-answered question (with the longest exposure and no password) in the Polling Booth returned 148 votes.
The key question about "division of power" returned 98 secure votes. (64% FOR)

perhaps it is worth thinking about the alternatives to
the Polling Booth method. It might not be in the interests
of fostering democracy to have an election in which only
90-odd members vote...

Meanwhile, though, I'd like to suggest that, whatever method
is chosen for the election, we could perhaps include a short
questionnaire with the Call for Nominations message. It
would be useful, I think, to know more about who our members are
and what kinds of access conditions they actually face. I'm
pressed for time now but will try to draft something for
discussion if nobody else has a better idea.
Yes please draft some basic questions about access. It might be a good thing to incorporate such questions in our sign -up form and enter them in the database..



-Those who profess to believe in direct democracy pass the real test when they disagree with a result, but still respect it.-



-joop




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