Re: Making the ballots secret

On Tue, Aug 07, 2007 at 06:01:54PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> While trying to find the definition of the multi-winner SPI method for
> Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, I spotted this little gem in Article Five of
> http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/by-laws which relates to comments I
> made elsewhere:
>
> "Ballots concerning election or removal of officers shall be secret
> ballots."
>
> At present, ballots are (correctly IMO) described as confidential, not
> secret, on the voting pages like
> https://members.spi-inc.org/vote/election.php?ref=6

That voting page relates to the election of directors, not of officers.
The election for officers as referenced in that bylaw was done by the
new board of directors at the 3-minute August 1st special board meeting,
which had no other business and had exactly one candidate for every
officer position. That was done by having the directors send their
votes via /msg to Neil or Michael (I forget which), who then announced
that the motion to approve the slate of officers had passed. I agree
that is less than fully secret given that one of the candidates in his
role as vote collector saw how everyone voted, and also that in general
it is good to know the vote totals, but given that none of the elections
were contested I'm not too worried about these issues in the particular
case that just occurred. They are worth addressing before the next
officer elections in case some positions then have multiple candidates.

- Jimmy Kaplowitz
jimmy(at)spi-inc(dot)org