[Mpi-forum] Voting in July (and beyond)

[Mohamad Chaarawi]

Hi All,

I will use the votes received on my ticket to propose a suggestion for 
future voting rules. I am not discussing anything about the ticket 
itself, nor promoting to change the voting results at the last meeting, 
but just to suggest what would make sense for later. I'm just using my 
ticket because the votes and reasons I received for this ticket covers a 
lot if not all voting categories and reasons :-)

The ticket received 8 (yes) - 2 (no) - 6 (abstain) votes.
After contacting the people who voted no and abstain, this was a summary 
of the reasons:

  * 1 NO vote, because of reason X
  * 1 NO vote, because of a misunderstanding
  * 2 abstain votes because of concerns Y and Z
  * 4 abstain votes because either the voters were attending the meeting
    for the first time and are not familiar with the ticket, or just do
    not understand what is being proposed or don't care. Some of them
    were aware that their votes means no, and some were not.

It totally makes sense to count the 2 NO votes, and 2 of the abstains to 
be as NO votes, but it is ridiculous to count the last 4 abstains as NO 
votes.
IMO what should happen is that the people who are abstaining because of 
a certain concern should just vote NO (not abstain), and then we use the 
old rule as pass = yes > no. If we go with the Japan rule then people 
should just vote YES or NO, because the abstain category is useless.

I hope that makes sense.

Thanks
Mohamad

On 6/14/2012 11:04 AM, Jeff Squyres wrote:
> On Jun 14, 2012, at 11:50 AM, Rolf Rabenseifner wrote:
>
>> Was nobody looking at our rules:
>> http://meetings.mpi-forum.org/secretary/voting.php
>> - Measures pass on simple majority.
>> - Formal votes will be taken by roll.
>>   If you are not present, your organization
>>   does not vote (effectively the same as abstain).
> Please see my prior emails (from a week or two ago) about this:
>
> - there are multiple accepted definitions of "simple majority"
> - "quorum" is not defined
> - there is also a question of the definition of "not present" -- does that not present in the room?  (which is how I have interpreted it, but there has been some bending of that rule on occasion)  Or not present at the meeting at all?  Or not present that day?  Or ...?
>
>> Here you can see "abstain" == "not voting",
>> and wiki clearly tells "simple majority"
>> means more than 50% of the passed votes.
> Even from this text, there is multiple possible interpretations.  :-\
>
>> Why was there a discussion about this?
>>
>> Jeff, how old is this file?
> SVN says:
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> r312 | jsquyres | 2010-06-16 16:30:51 -0400 (Wed, 16 Jun 2010) | 2 lines
> Changed paths:
>     M /trunk/secretary/index.php
>     A /trunk/secretary/voting.php
>
> Add voting rules
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The file has not changed since that date.
>
> In mails a week or two ago, I discussed the history of the MPI-3 procedures document, too.
>


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