RE: [ga] nomination procedures

[R.Gaetano@iaea.org]

Kent,

I perfectly understand your reasoning, and to a certain extent I agree.
But I would like to raise a couple of issues.

You wrote:
> 
> The primary purpose of the "send everybody with N endorsers" approach
> is not into reduce noise -- it is to be sure that qualified
> candidates don't get lost in a flood of fake support for bad
> candidates.  It will, I believe, also have the characteristic of
> reducing noise, because it will remove one of the primary incentives
> for noise. 
> 
> In the extreme, the method you propose would allow Jeff Williams, who
> has quietly signed up 50 fake names to the GA list, to carry the day
> and get his 5 favorite candidates selected.  (I myself have signed up
> a few fake names just in case the votes are needed.)
> 
> Given your rule, the NC would have no choice but to elect someone
> from the "Jeff Williams 5".  The rule you propose creates an
> incentive for such behavior. 
> 
> I said "in the extreme", above, and of course, I don't consider that
> extreme *too* likely.  But 1) the incentive it creates is bad enough;
> and 2) I do think that an election with an unauthenticatable
> electorate is a real danger.
> 

As I said, I agree with your concerns, but there is the other side of the
coin that I am also afraid of, which is that an individual with very few
supporters may be picked by the NC in spite of the fact that there may be
people that have a long list of supporters - maybe most of which "real" ;>).

> > And if the NC is willing to approve
> > a procedure under which it can select a chair only from the 
> X names with
> > the most support within the GA, I think it's worth it for 
> us to try to find
> > those X names, rather than simply letting the disrupters prevail.
> 
> You didn't really answer the question: what is the advantage of
> restricting the NCs choice? In the last nomination most candidates
> got more than the necessary minimum of endorsements, and that excess
> was some measure of popularity in the GA.  I agree with you that in
> an election for chair of the GA, support of the GA is important, but
> I submit that we will get a rough measure of that support, in any
> case.
> 

The point is the use that the NC will make of that support. I hate to quote
again the case of Rick White, but...

Also, another point on the table was the GA-list + DNSO-announce only vs.
the superset of all DNSO-related mailing lists.

The real problem is that we have in the DNSO people that are participating
in one or more constituencies, and people who don't (mainly because there's
no Individual DN holders constituency).
This means that these people (myself being one of those) don't have any
other place than the GA. It seems odd to me that the Chair of the GA could
be elected by the NC (expression of the people belonging to some recognized
constituency only), moreover based on a minimum number of nomination that
can easily be reached by the NC members alone (or by any Constituency).

In other words, my concern is the political statement that ordinary people
(the "real individuals that do not belong to any constituency") do not
count.

Regards
Roberto