[council] More on Voting Procedures (Disclosure Arrangements)

[Louis Touton <touton@icann.org>]

To the GNSO Council:

As I described at the beginning of today's GNSO Council gTLD Committee
teleconference, today I will be sending out additional explanations of
the voting procedures for the GNSO Council's selection of Seats 14 and
13 for the Board.  These explanations supplement the messages Glen,
Bruce, and I sent out yesterday, and are intended to answer procedural
questions during the voting, in the hope of reducing any possible future
arguments over the procedures.

As Harold Feld suggested, Glen will compile the various explanations of
the Seat 14 voting procedure, and the compilation will be posted and
e-mailed to each candidate.

Yesterday's messages described the schedule and the procedures for
counting the votes in each round to eliminate candidates from subesquent
rounds.  This message describes the arrangements to be followed
regarding disclosure of the voting.

ARRANGEMENTS REGARDING DISCLOSURE OF VOTING

The arrangments regarding disclosure of voting will be very similar to
the procedures followed in the past by the DNSO Names Council in its
selection of members to the ICANN Board.

For references to the past procedures, see
<http://www.dnso.org/elections/2000.DNSO-ICANN-election.html>
<http://www.dnso.org/elections/2001.DNSO-ICANN-election.html>
<http://www.dnso.org/elections/2002.DNSO-ICANN-election.html>

Here are the arrangements:

   1.  Public archiving of the GNSO Council list <council@dnso.org> will
be stopped immediately.  In addition, the recipients of the list will be
limited to: (a) members of the GNSO Council, but excluding Philip
Sheppard, who is a candidate; and (b) the GNSO Secretariat.  (If the
registrars constituency selects a new GNSO Council member during the
process, he or she will be added to the list if he or she is not also a
candidate.)  The list recipients and archiving will be restored at the
end of the process (step 7 below).

   2.  Messages posted to the <council@dnso.org> list from its closure
(see step 1 above) to its re-opening (see step 7 below) should be
treated as confidential until the re-opening.  The GNSO Secretariat may,
however, disclose them to the General Counsel to the extent appropriate
to obtain advice about how to handle procedural problems that arise
during the voting process.

   3.  Ballots will be sent out individually to each GNSO Council
members' e-mail address.

   4.  Ballots should be filled out and returned to the e-mail address
stated in the ballot.  They should not be copied to any e-mail list.

   5.  At the scheduled times, the Secretariat will announce the results
of each round of balloting by sending a message to the
<council@dnso.org> mailing list.  These announcements will include:

   a.  The number of votes received by each candidate;
   b.  The names of the GNSO Council members from whom ballots were
received; and
   c.  The confidential code number of each ballot and the candidate for
whom it was voted.

Item 5(c) will allow each GNSO Council member to double-check that his
or her ballot was properly understood, but will not allow others to
determine how the member voted.

   6.  Discussion among the the GNSO Council members during the voting
process may occur on the <council@dnso.org> mailing list.  These
discussions will be private during the voting process, but will be
available as public archives after the process for selecting Seat 14 is
completed.  Please note that the General Council will not be a recipient
of the list during this period, so he should be copied on any particular
message that you wish to bring to his attention.

   7.  The GNSO Council will confirm the results of the voting at its
meeting in Rio de Janeiro on 25 March 2003.  Once that occurs, the GNSO
Secretariat will prepare and post a full record of all voting, including
how each member voted in each round.  The previous configuration of the
<council@dnso.org> mailing list (i.e. recipients) will be restored and
the archives of the list during the period between steps 1 and 7 will
become publicly available.

OTHER PROCEDURES

If any GNSO Council member discovers a procedure that should be
clarified, please send me a message today.  As appropriate, I will
prepare and send out a message clarifying these points.

If any GNSO Council member has any objections to the above, please send
them to the <council@dnso.org> list AND TO <touton@icann.org> within the
next 24 hours.

Best regards,

Louis Touton