[wplug-plan] Election rule change proposal

[David Ostroske]

Hi Mike,

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 9:05 AM, Michael Semcheski<mhsemcheski at gmail.com> wrote:
> I remember planning for the elections meeting last year.  I couldn't
> make it to that meeting myself, but it seems like it must have taken
> 45 minutes to count the ballots.  (Polls close at 3:45.  Meeting
> adjourned at 5:15 after it was determined that 1 of the 5 director's
> seats hadn't been filled.)

I remember that meeting pretty well, because I was one of the two
tellers. Diana Clarion was the other teller.

We started by making sure that all the votes were from members in good
standing. We didn't have a list on hand, so Vance had to lend us his
laptop. We should have had that list of eligible voters printed up
earlier, and we ought to do that this year.

The way that we worked the tallying was that one of us would read a
ballot and write down the scores, and the other would repeat it and do
the same on their own copy of the tally sheet. There were about a
dozen ballots, so that wasn't a big problem. We each stumbled once or
twice, so we had to go back and make sure that we were getting the
same results.

We had a few ballots where the write-ins were illegible (again, we
needed more nominees), so we had to make some judgment calls. That was
the most difficult part of the process. We were able to determine
votes for Brian Seklecki and Bob Turley, and a third person's name
appeared as well (I forget whose name). But in the end, all the
write-ins were taken into account.

We definitely dotted every I and crossed every T. I wanted as full a
report as we could make, even if only 4 people were elected. So I may
have been responsible for some of the slow response, even though I had
a full grasp of the system.

> I agree with Vance's basic premise that the current system is
> cumbersome and unwieldy.  If we do not amend the bylaws, we should
> definitely come up with a better ballot and probably a better process
> for the vote counters to use.

We don't need a bylaws change for this. All we need is a change to the
special rules of order that define the voting method. And I maintain
that even that isn't necessary if we just streamlined our paperwork
and made the ballots less confusing.

-- Dave O