[Lnc-business] Election Buddy in tonight's test run

[Alicia Mattson]

By the way, I was attempting to raise a point of order about this matter in
the Q&A box, which is where we were instructed to raise privileged motions,
but it was never addressed by the chair.  From my limited-by-admins
perspective, it felt like I was being ignored.  I am told by my delegation
chair who could see the Q&A that it had lots of other posts in it, and it
could have been lost in the noise.

The Q&A box tonight was a mystery that I noted, and others noted, but there
was never a good explanation for the selective/restricted view that the
participants had of that information.  Out of all the traffic that was
apparently in the Q&A box, I only ever saw about 15 seemingly-random items
posted by others.  I have no idea what the rhyme or reason was for which
things I could or couldn't see.

-Alicia




On Fri, May 15, 2020 at 9:43 PM Alicia Mattson <alicia.mattson at lp.org>
wrote:

> I need to point out something important from the Election Buddy voting
> software which was demonstrated during tonight's test run.
>
> RONR p. 263 notes that it is "a fundamental principle of parliamentary law
> that the right to vote is limited to the members of an organization who are
> actually present at the time the vote is taken in a regular or properly
> called meeting."
>
> Yet the Election Buddy vote conducted during tonight's test sent ballots
> to all delegates, not just those who were actually present in the meeting.
> The shared screens weren't visible for that long for me to catch the
> details, but it probably also went to the alternates in addition to the
> delegates, since the one emailed to us earlier today had over 1300
> recipients and not just 1046.
>
> Obviously in a live scenario, it must be limited to only whoever was
> present and eligible to vote at that time, which could be a blend of
> delegates and alternates.
>
> Again I'm going to emphasize that Convention Rule 10 requires that when
> votes are submitted by delegation, the delegates must vote with written
> ballots which are submitted so as to constitute an audit trail.  The
> chair's instructions on these test runs for delegation chairs to collect
> their votes however they wish is not compliant with our rules.  We'll have
> no audit trail when it's being done 51 different ways.
>
> Since we're being placed in webinar mode, I have no way of knowing whether
> there are 2 or 30 delegates present at the meeting from any given
> affiliate.  Only a delegation chair knows.  This plan makes it VERY EASY
> for a theoretically naughty delegation chair (not mine - 'cause Mimi is
> awesome and trustworthy!!) to stuff extra votes into the submitted tallies
> without anyone noticing.
>
> -Alicia
>
>