2009 Director Elections

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The below process was agreed to by consensus at the meeting on 2009-11-17.

NOM_DATE: 2009-12-1. Date nominations close. This is 2 weeks after we agreed on the election process.

ELECTION_DATE: 2009-12-8. Date on which the elections are held. This should be whenever the most people are able to attend, but at least a week after NOM_DATE to allow for absentee ballots. Absentee ballots must be received by this date.

VOTE_COUNTER: Person who processes the votes. Seth Schoen, the Secretary, will do this with the assistance of at least one other person TBD.

Board's proposal:

Nominations shall open immediately, and close on 2009-12-1. Nominees shall be listed on this wiki, on 2009 Board Nominees. On 2009-12-1 the wiki page will be locked for changes, so if you want or don't want to be a board member, make sure your name is or is not on it by 2009-12-1.

The ballot will look like the example on the Schulze method wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Preferential_ballot.svg . It will have explanatory text at the top:

"Write a ranking next to one or more candidates (i.e. 1 is most preferred and larger numbers are less preferred). You may repeat your rankings as often as you want or leave any number of candidates unranked, but we suggest you rank at least 4 candidates as there are 4 openings."

The Secretary will provide a list of all members in good standing (these are the eligible voters) by 2009-12-1. If you aren't sure you're in good standing, check with the Secretary (Seth Schoen) or Treasurer (Jeffrey Malone) before then. Good standing basically means you're paid up. This list will be the voter roll. It will be available for review by any member upon request from any board member or officer.

We will have a ballot box at Noisebridge from 2009-12-1 onwards into which you may place an absentee ballot if you can't make it to the election. If you can't make it to Noisebridge at all you can mail a ballot, which must be clearly marked 'BALLOT' on the envelope, to the PMB address which we'll check the afternoon of 2009-12-8. You can also submit your ballot to any board member or officer, or in any other way it occurs to you as long as it gets into the box by 2009-12-8.

On 2009-12-8 all those on the voter roll who have not already voted will receive paper ballots and can fill them out and put them in the box. After every member who chooses to vote has put their ballot in the box, Seth will set up the Python Schultze implementation written by Ka-Ping Yee (http://zesty.ca/condorcet.zip) and enter all the votes into it. The 4 nominees with the most wins will become the new board members.

We will do no work to prevent voting fraud (fraud is after all un-excellent). If there are many more ballots than voters on the roll, we'll have to throw out the results and do something else. If there are only one or two more ballots than voters, we will assume that someone voted twice by accident, forgetting that they already did, and accept the results.

This process is based on Andy's proposal at https://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/board/2009-October/000629.html but has a few changes. Also, Andy says:

"I do not believe we currently have any active members identified solely by digital signature. (What a shame!) However we do have one anonymous member AFAIK, who may wish to become so identified for voting purposes. If we want to support electronic voting we can publish a GPG key to which signed ballots can be encrypted. However I have no reasonable way to implement secret ballots in such a system."

If someone wants to support electronic voting they should build a system and persuade us to use it.