RE: [ga] FW from ncdnhc: GA Chair proposal from Names Council

[Jonathan Weinberg <weinberg@mail.msen.com>]

At 06:51 PM 11/12/99 +0100, R.Gaetano@iaea.org wrote:
>[snip]
>About the exact number of names to forward, I think that this is related to
>the number of votes each person has.
>In fact, one thing that we should improve in relationship with the
>nomination process of the BoD candidates is to specify *in advance* how many
>votes a "member" has (and of course who the "members" are).
>Oh, yes, and also if there is a constraint in the distribution (for
>instance, geographical).
>My approach is:
>[snip]
>Each "nominator" can express 3 preferences, in a definite order.
>The first preference counts 3 points, the second 2, the third 1.
>Preferences have to be geographically distributed, i.e. not more than one
>person per geographical region.
>The problem I see is that if a nominee renounces, the nominator loses
>his/her vote (but this is not related to the "weighted preference", but is
>inherent in the system that allows only a limited number of votes to be cast
>per nominator).
>For this reason I propose that we start already nominating informally
>candidates, so that we can ideally arrive to the opening date with a list of
>people that intend to run for the office.
>[snip]

	I'm just wondering -- *is* this an improvement over the process we used in
connection with the BoD candidates?  If we followed that process here, each
voter would have an unlimited number of votes, with the constraint that the
voter could cast no more than one vote for any given candidate.  A voter
could choose either to husband his votes, casting them only for the
candidate(s) he likes best, or to spread his votes more widely.  It seems
to me that that approach worked pretty well with the BoD candidates.

	It would have at least two specific advantages.  [1] It would be easy to
administer; the only thing that would need to be verified, with respect to
any given vote, would be whether the voter is a member of the ga list.
(That will require checking headers, though, not just return addresses.)
[2] It would allow nominations and voting to take place simultaneously; we
wouldn't need to have the list of candidates already assembled before the
voting begins.  If we want to have a feature promoting geographical
diversity, we can do it by saying something like, "the top three
vote-getters go to the NC, *except* that no more than two of them can be
from a single region . . ." ).

Jon


Jonathan Weinberg
weinberg@msen.com