Re: Membership criteria - was [ga] NC BS

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 02:11:52PM -0700, Gary Osbourne wrote:
> >Announcements to slashdot make the possibility of
> >ballot stuffing by large numbers of of uninformed
> >voters look a whole lot more serious.
> 
> So /.ers are less informed about ICANN matters than
> whom, for example? Intellectual property interests?

Probably.  IP interests are remarkably organized and effective, and 
they wouldn't be that way if they were uninformed.

> You are allowed to care if one, or the other, are
> uninformed voters, as am I, but you are not allowed
> under the rules to deny them the right to vote for
> merely being uninformed. Nor are you allowed under
> the rules to screen membership based on one's level
> of being *informed* The existing rules do not state
> that only *informed* persons may be members.

The existing rules for voting in a US federal election don't say that
you have to be informed, either, but to vote in a US election you have
to either 1) go through a very arduous and lengthy process to become a
citizen, part of which includes being tested on you knowledge of US
governmental structures; or 2) be born a citizen and wait 18 years, 12
years of which usually involve instruction in US governmental structure. 

One of the major justifications for a public education system is to have
an informed electorate; the dangers of an uninformed electorate are
well-known.

> As you seem to be a watchdog of the voting process,
> perhaps you could inform us of any prior attempts,
> or successes, at GA ballot stuffing. If there aren't
> any, why are you attempting to address a problem
> that does not exist? If there were such, what, if
> any, attempts were made to address the problem?

There has been, in my experience, at least one obvious attempt in prior
elections to "stuff the ballot", (or, as a friend put it "engage in an
exceptionally vigorous grass roots registration campaign").  In that
case the result wasn't affected by the attempt; the watchdogs decided it
wasn't worth invalidating the election over. 

[...]


-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
Technical Support Manager, ICANN            lonesome."
crispin@icann.org,kent@songbird.com                    -- Mark Twain

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