[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

[Michael Snow]

Kelly Martin wrote:

> On 9/19/06, Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Anyways, my point was that indirect elections _might_ turn out to have
>> inaccurate results (though that is a rather rare situation), and that
>> it would be especially hard to arrange this on Wikimedia projects.
>
> Indirect election of officials in voluntary organizations with large,
> geographically diverse membership is common and may actually be the
> norm.  Comparisons with election of geopolitical leaders ("involuntary
> organizations") are simply inapposite; there are so many functional
> differences between electing a head of government and electing the
> officers of a voluntary organization.
>
> Rejecting the idea simply because it superficially resembles the
> American college of electors (which, by the way, is a very strange
> form of indirect election) is, frankly, silly.  Rejecting it because
> it seems too difficult to implement today is shortsighted.
>
> Let's also not forget that direct democracy elected Hitler, and yet we
> still use it as well.

I'm not sure how "direct" a concept of democracy you have in mind, but 
Hitler was *appointed* Chancellor. After Hindenburg's death, he declared 
himself Führer. Thereafter, he rushed through a vote to ratify this 
action, but if that's democracy, so was Saddam Hussein's last election. 
If you mean that he personally was democratically elected, I don't see 
it. If you simply mean that he became politically powerful enough to 
turn a parliamentary republic into a totalitarian state, that too is a 
cautionary tale, but this is an odd way of expressing that.

I don't think an argument about different electoral formats is getting 
at the right issue, anyway. The concern about elections in a Wikimedia 
context is primarily an extension of the difficulty that the right to 
vote in our elections corresponds only rather inexactly to anything that 
could constitute citizenship. It might be possible to address that with 
a membership model, but as I've pointed out before, membership has its 
own problems.

--Michael Snow