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From: mesard@bbn.com (Wayne Mesard)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Voter registration (was Re: Suspicious Results of sci.aquaria vote)
Message-ID: <48464@bbn.COM>
Date: 18 Nov 89 20:50:49 GMT
Article-I.D.: bbn.48464
References: <4199@nigel.udel.EDU> <2421@stl.stc.co.uk>
Sender: news@bbn.COM
Reply-To: mesard@BBN.COM (Wayne Mesard)
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
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"David Wright" <dww@stl.stc.co.uk> writes:
>Of course our guidelines do not prevent [lobbying by email], so it is
>'legal', indeed it is hard to see how it could be prevented totally.
>But if it becomes common practice, it is going to create some real
>distortions in the voting results; 

Okay, if we're interested in taking this democracy thang seriously, I
propose that we institute [da da da dahhhh] Voter Registration: In
order to participate in a newgroup vote, a user must register with some
central [gasp] authority [gasp] two months before the call for votes.

A voter's registration will lapse if s/he fails to participate in a vote
for a period of 12 months.  [In fairness, I think this would also
necessitate an abstention vote which would serve to keep the voter's
registration active.]  Of course, a voter whose registration has expired
can reregister as described above.

Some fairly simple software could maintain the voting/registration
records.  It could even send email to voters whose registration is about
to expire.

So:

 o Disenfranchised readers could not be rounded up to vote for a group
   for which they have no genuine interest.

 o New comers and casual net.readers with a direct interest in the
   proposed group can freely lobby registered voters in news.groups.
   Thus, voting becomes a sort of ad hoc representative democracy, where
   those voting evaluate public opinion and the Good of the Net.

 o Voters are more likely to have a better sense of Usenet culture and
   of net.continuity.  This would make it more likely that they would
   understand *why* hierarchy foo.bar is a bad place for a proposed
   newsgroup.  [If there's one thing we learned from the s.a ordeal,
   it's that many, many voters merely found the [ahem] debate to be
   loud, as opposed to informative.


----
Myself, I think making the net's operation more democratic will be a
failed experiment.  I would prefer to see it move more towards genuine
anarchy, with each site acting as independently and heterogeneously as
possible.

However, if we're going to insist on amend (rather than rewriting) the
current voting procedure, then I think some form of registration is in
order.

-- 
void *Wayne_Mesard();         Mesard@BBN.COM         BBN, Cambridge, MA