Hi everyone,

I’m just following up here, because it has been brought to our attention that not everyone has access to the SecurePoll data dump, and therefore are missing the feedback that was collected through the voting ballots for the recent Movement Charter ratification vote.

Voter feedback

Staff has now listed all comments (65 comments from the affiliates voters https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Ratification/Voting/Results/Voter_comments_-_affiliates and 447 comments from the individual voters https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Ratification/Voting/Results/Voter_comments_-_individuals) on Meta-wiki. They are displayed in sortable tables, but since this is the raw data, especially the page with comments from individuals, it can take some time to load.

We are also still working on a summary of this feedback that will be published before we come together at Wikimania, yet we know that some of you want to prepare now and not wait for the publication of this piece, so we are publishing the comments first.

Ratification quorum, turnout and threshold (clarification)

After the publication of the results of the affiliate and individual votes, we also noticed some discussion about the participation quorum and the approval threshold of the ratification vote. We’d like to take this opportunity to clarify the process:

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The participation quorum is how many people should cast any sort of vote (yes/no/neutral). After the April 2023 feedback round, we realized, both from comments and from experience in the Universal Code of Conduct votings, a minimum % based on previous single-choice votes made sense. Initially, we were operating from the assumption that the individual voter eligibility pool would be around 60-70K individuals, similar to previous Board elections. However, when we generated the voter list, it came out to be around 117K individuals. Here, a small change made all the difference: in previous elections (that had 60-70K eligible voters), the voting criteria allowed for a duration of 6 months (in the 2022 Board elections, it was Jan 2022 - July 2022 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2022/Voter_eligibility_guidelines) to make 20 edits, whereas the voter criteria for this ratification vote allowed for a duration of 2 years (May 2022 to May 2024 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Ratification/Voting/Eligibility_criteria) to make 20 edits, deeming more voters to be eligible to vote. To maintain the same number of voters (>2400), we changed the percentage from 4%, to a threshold of 2% of the eligible voter pool. -

The voter turnout was lower than in WMF Board of Trustees elections, because of the topic of the vote (not everyone would have been as familiar with the concept of a Movement Charter, as they are with the bi-annually occurring Board of Trustee elections), and also largely because the extraordinary mechanism of mass-emailing all eligible voters was not used. The choice not to use this tool was a deliberate decision by the MCDC, made early on in the drafting process and in collaboration with WMF's communications department, because while very effective in getting people's attention, mass mailing is considered a rather intrusive method of communication and is only to be used in exceptional circumstances. -

The approval threshold is how many voted in support of ratification. Originally, the ratification methodology placed this as 50%+1, but after feedback from the community, it was increased to 55% (but complemented with the addition of the quorum as described in the first bullet above).

It was further agreed upon between the MCDC and CEC, and communicated to the community, that a neutral (–) vote counted as participation, but not towards the approval threshold; a neutral vote would not count in favor of or in opposition to ratification.

Had we, as some proposed, counted the neutral vote anyway, the results of the votes would have been the following:

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Individual vote = 1710 “yes” votes / 2446 total votes = 69.91% approval -

Affiliate vote = 93 “yes” votes / 129 total votes = 72.09% approval

Both of the votes would still pass the approval threshold if we counted the neutral votes in the total.

We hope the information in this email provides additional clarity and context.

On behalf of the MCDC and CEC,

Borschts