Re: [ga] Re: electoral fraud by the ga chair

[Joop Teernstra <terastra@terabytz.co.nz>]

At 03:28 31/01/00 +0100, Roberto Gaetano wrote:
>Joop,
>
>You wrote:
>>
>>Just tell the list how many FOR and AGAINST votes you made anonymously 
>and
>>Roberto can rewrite the informal poll result.
>
>
>Why?
>As I said, the most evident result of the poll was the lack of 
>participation.
>
Roberto,

The most evident result of *any* poll on DNS matters is the lack of
participation.
ICANN itself is characterized by lack of participation.
The people who bother to vote are a subgroup of a subgroup of a very small
group that has an active interest in Domain issues--  This in spite of the
fact that hundreds of thousands are affected by DNS policies.

Even outside the DNS, in the Alaska internet voting experiment, the
participation was low. See
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/013000internet-voting-review.html

The lack of participation of the majority does not nullify the rights of
those who bother to participate, unless that majority is not informed about
their right to participate.  
When travel around the world limits participation, it's a different story.
But in Cyberspace there is no excuse.

The non-participants are voluntarily leaving the matter in the hands of
the participants, as always happens with voluntary voting.

The pattern of voting clearly indicated that those who did participate felt
strongly about it. (those who had had the guts full of the rubbish quickly
voted FOR)  The AGAINST votes came later, either because people thought
about the principle involved, or because they could not support all the
rules in detail. 
A lot of the non-voters were probably genuinely in two minds about the
effectiveness of (temporary) bannings through SaA's.

>Only an insignificant minority cared to express their opinion, and the 
>figures would not have been much different with a secure voting: 
>probably with a complex procedure the figures would have been even much 
>lower.

No , I don't think so. Probably the same or better. People feel addressed,
when they get an individual email with their own password.  Especially when
people are already leaving list stuff unread in a special filter because of
the noise.
With all due respect, I also think that the vote was insufficiently
announced. Hiding the URL for the polling place in an attachment didn't
make it more visible either.


>The elimination from the count of irregular expressions of opinion, even
> supposing there were any, would only have had the effect of indicating 
>an even lower participation.
>
By a few votes, yes.

>Therefore, no need to do anything. If people intended to show their will
>, they would have done so.
>
>>
>>Better still: The list can have another poll, this time with a proper
>>voters' roll and voter passwords, on improved rules that incorporate
>>apologies.
>
>
>After the three months of experimentation with the new rules, we will 
>have a vote (secure, this time) and we will see what people think.
>If they prefere the "old" regime, fine, the rules will be eliminated and
> I will consider myself free to go back to other occupations. If they 
>prefere the "new" regime, it will be clear that all this discussion is 
>in reality much ado for nothing.
>
>Fair enough?
>
It would be better to give the GA members a bit more choice than that. A
WG , such as WG-D could try to come up with better tuned list rules that
would find wider approval than indicated by the last poll.

In the IDNO we are currently voting on 2 different options of list-rule
enforcement. Nothing prevents the GA from giving its members more options.
 

--Joop Teernstra LL.M.--  , founder  of
the Cyberspace Association,
the constituency for Individual Domain Name Owners
http://www.idno.org  (or direct:) 
http://www.democracy.org.nz/idno/