On Sun, 28 Sep 2003 22:24:17 -0700, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com gave utterance to the following:

tarquin wrote:

...

The current winner should be disqualified on technical grounds -- it simply does not meet the design brief of the competition.

In a democracy sometimes your side loses. Get over it work on a better variant of the *same* concept.

What you are saying is, so long as he won most votes, you wouldn't object to Richard Branson becoming Governor of California, despite the technical fact that as a British citizen he wouldn't qualify?

Of course that scenario simply isn't likely to happen in most democratic states, because technical qualification is screened before a candidate is eligible* - a step which didn't happen here.

I think that next time we choose a logo, be that sooner or later, candidates should be judged under three or four categories. The technical ones - whether a logo will adapt well to being printed 6mm high on a pen, and whether it meets the design brief, to be judged by an expert panel (and if necessary, experts from outside the W community, e.g. printers) in order to qualify for the democratic aspects such as symbolism and aestetics. After all, Miss world is supposedly judged on intelligence and personality, not just how she looks in a swimsuit :-)

*In New Zealand's last election, an elected MP was ousted a month after the election because it was realized that she only had permanent residency, not citizenship. She claimed to have "misunderstood" a part of the candidacy declaration.