It’s time for our yearly board of directors election, this year we will be doing things slightly differently to help satisfy some legal requirements. This post will be broken up into a few sections, the first section will be a short rundown of how to how to vote online. If you don’t care about the minutia of the election process, you need only read that section. The second section will go over how what you need to do if you wish to run for election to the board. The third section will detail the specifics of the new system, as well as the motivation and reasoning.
How do I vote online?
Voting online is simple and will use our existing voting system. If you are already a voting member, your LDAP/AD account will let you access the voting system. If it won’t let you login and you wish to become a voting member (you must have been a member for at least 3 months), you’ll need to complete a few steps:
- Make sure your Active Directory (AD) account is enabled
- Create a helpdesk ticket requesting voting rights
- Try logging into the voting system again
- If that doesn’t work, submit a helpdesk ticket asking for assistance
Online voting will start on April 7th at 7pm and end on April 14th at 7pm.
As part of the new system, the way online voting is being handled, your vote will be considered granting me your proxy for the Annual Membership Meeting, held on April 14th at 8pm. I will vote on your behalf at the meeting, exactly as you have voted in the online voting system. That means that if you use the online voting system it will be exactly the same as if you were physically present and cast a vote at the Annual Membership Meeting. If you have questions about the specifics or why we are doing things this way, please read the rest of this post.
I’d like to be a board member, what should I do?
First, read through this entire post, especially the section detailing the new election system. As a board member you will be expected to understand these kinds of things, might as well get started now!
Next, post a Statement of Intent on the wiki, under the Statements of Intent Category. Feel free to use my SOI as an example. This must be done before March 31st at 7pm in you wish to be included on the ballet for online voting.
We will be scheduling a Meet The Candidates, it would likely be best to show up to that as well.
Details on the new system
It’s been brought to our attention that the previous interpretation of the online voting system being our Annual Membership Meeting, may not be considered enough under Texas law. While online voting has worked for us in the past, and we would like to continue with that system going forward, we have decided to ensure we are complying with the letter of the law as best as we can.
For this election, the online voting system will be used for voting members to assign me as their proxy, and direct me as to how they wish to vote. That voting/proxy concludes 1 hour before the Annual Membership Meeting. At the meeting I will cast the proxy votes exactly as they were registered by each voting member. This allows us to meet the letter of the law (having an in-person meeting), while still giving our members the ability to vote online, using the system they have always used.
That said, voting members are still able to come to the meeting or assign their proxy to another person. Please note, if you wish to use another proxy, we will need the proxy to provide some kind of signed letter or documentation. Ideally the meeting will involve no in-person votes, allowing us to simply transcribe the votes directly from the online system. In actuality, there will likely be a handful of in-person votes, which we will then need to reconcile with the list of votes made online.
Since this is a membership meeting, additional agenda items may be discussed. I will abstain from voting for any agenda items other than the board of directors election on behalf of the members who have granted me their proxy. Any member who wishes to vote on additional items person at the meeting AND use the online voting system for the board election can simply vote online but not fill out a physical ballot at the meeting.
In order to accurately count and record the board of directors vote, we will require the use of physical ballots at the Annual Membership Meeting. Those ballots will then be reconciled with the online proxy vote and our list of voting members (to ensure only voting members have voted).
For notification, I’ll be sending an announcement e-mail to all currently active members in the billing system, directing them to this thread.
If there are any questions about the election process, please use this thread.