PAB strives to reach rough consensus on an issue before making any recommendation to the POC or taking any other action. At one time or another it will become apparent that there is no consensus on a particular issue and the Chairman will declare that the issue will be put to a vote.
A draft ballot will be prepared by the Secretary and forwarded to the vote taker.
The vote taker prepares the final ballot, editing only for consistent wording and compatability with the voting software. See the ballot appended as Appendix A for an example.
Prepared ballots are mailed to the voting contact* of all PAB members four times at X day intervals. Using X=3 and having 4 days after the mailing of the final ballot gives a two week voting period.
* The voting contact is defined as the first, of possibly several, e-mail address an organization has subscribed to the PAB list.
Votes are cast by Replying to the ballot e-mail and indicating their choice from the various options available.
When a completed ballot is received by the vote taker an acknowledgement is returned to the voter. (See Appendix B) The completed ballot is added to an archive message store established for this one vote and the vote is also parsed and a voting database updated to reflect the ballot.
If a ballot is deemed unacceptable for any reason it is returned to the sender with an explanation. In our first vote the only errors encountered were votes from non-voting contacts (these were all resolved) and ballots received after the close of the voting period.
Please note that all decisions are built into the voting software, no allowances are made for any reason.
A voting member may submit multiple ballots, the last ballot received is the only one counted.
At the end of the voting period the results are tabulated and an e-mail containing the results is sent to the list. (See Appendix C) Web pages containing the results are generated at the same time. See www.pab.gtld-mou.org/votes/index.html
As you can see the ballots are completely open once the voting period has ended. This allows everyone to verify that their vote was counted as cast. Members may only protest their own ballot. In the event of a protest, the original ballots complete with full headers are available for audit
If I have left any questions unanswered please let me know. contact Dan Busarow
Dan -- Dan Busarow 714 443 4172 DPC Systems / Beach.Net dan@dpcsys.com Dana Point, California 83 09 EF 59 E0 11 89 B4 8D 09 DB FD E1 DD 0C 82