On 24 Jan 2009, at 23:06, James Farrar wrote: > 2009/1/24 Thomas Dalton <[email protected]>: >> 2009/1/24 James Farrar <[email protected]>: >>> My past experience as a returning officer, as a candidate, and as a >>> candidate's agent in elections suggests that allowing candidates or >>> potential candidates a running commentary of candidates standing >>> negatively influences the fairness of an electoral process - and >>> this >>> is particularly true when only a subset of potential candidates is >>> getting this information. >> >> I don't think you can keep that kind of information from the board. >> The board are responsible for holding the AGM and running the >> election >> correctly, they need to know what is going on. > > Then why appoint a Teller or Tellers independent of the Board?
Because the board members, if standing for re-election, have a vested interest in the outcome. An independent person taking the lead in the election helps avoid that vested interest becoming a problem. At the same time, the board needs to be sure that everything is going correctly and smoothly with the election. That said, I can see how information on the candidates is useful to other candidates - for example, what goes into candidate statements. An alternative approach might be to do something similar to the last elections, having candidate statements etc. on a wiki page, although this would have to be done informally. Or candidate statements could be sent solely to the teller(s) separate from the rest of the information. Mike _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list [email protected] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
