Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!naim
From: naim@eecs.nwu.edu (Naim Abdullah)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: Re: voting results -- soc.religion.islam
Message-ID: <3740028@eecs.nwu.edu>
Date: 16 Nov 89 05:19:28 GMT
References: <968@sequoia.UUCP>
Organization: Northwestern U, Evanston IL, USA
Lines: 66

dewey@sequoia.UUCP (Dewey Henize) writes (regarding the voting results for
soc.religion.islam) :

>Apparently there's more problem than that.  I know I tried several times
>to vote on this.  No response, no bounce, and I'm not in the list.

Last year when Basalat ran the vote for talk.religion.islam this happened
to several people. It was sometimes hard to get mail to tavi.rice.edu. This
is why this time, there was an alternative machine to send your votes if 
mail to tavi.rice.edu bounced. As a last resort, you could send your votes
to one of the moderators who would forward the vote to Basalat.

Basalat did not count the forwarded votes if he couldn't get in touch with
the original voter. They were all YES anyway.

You should have tried one of the alternative machines to get your vote to
Basalat or you should have sent your vote to one of the moderators who
would have forwarded your vote. These instructions were mentioned in the
call for votes.

>I'm NOT crying fraud here.  But something is really wrong with these
>votes.  I have a lot of trouble believing that this issue generated such
>low turnout after all the discussion,

Well, compared to what goes on in news.groups, there was hardly a lot
of discussion. When Basalat proposed the group, there was some concern
expressed about whether critical articles about Islam would be acceptable
in the group. I posted the moderator guidelines for the group and the
discussion died down very quickly. The discussion never reached a very
high volume.

> and I also really have a problem
>with the addresses.  Scanning over it, there are very few that aren't
>internet sites, as if the various uucp sites didn't get there at all.

How can you judge whether a site is an Internet site or a uucp site ?
Let me make a couple of points:

1) The format of the name is not enough. For example, people mailing from
uucp sites do NOT necessarily have addresses of the form "foo@bar.uucp".
Nor do they necessarily have an address of the form "x!y!z". I know of at least
one site on the voting list that is a uucp site but has an address that
looks indistinguishible from an Internet address. Some of us do have
working mailers :-).

2) Most educational institutions are on the Internet.

Unless you can provide more evidence that the uucp sites were ignored,
I think your criticism does not carry much weight.

>By the way, what's this about forwarded votes?  I thought a person voted,
>not asked someone else to vote.  Again, not a cry of FRAUD, but I'd really
>like to hear about this innovation.

The forwarded votes mentioned by Basalat were those that were mailed by the 
voter to the moderator, since the voter could not get their vote to 
tavi.rice.edu or the alternative voting address. The moderator forwarded the 
vote to Basalat exactly as received. I think there was a total of 4 or 5
such cases (ball park figure).

As Basalat mentioned, such votes were not counted unless he was able to confirm
the vote with the original sender.

My, you are a suspicious bunch :-) .

      Naim