[Foundation-l] [Election] Unqualified votes striking

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/5/07, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> The Election Committee regretfully announces that we will have to
> remove approximately 220 votes submitted. These votes were cast by
> people not entitled to vote. The election rules state that users must
> have at least 400 edits by March 1 to be eligible to vote.

When were the rules changed? Who approved the change?

The approved rules at the start of the election were, specifically:

*On a single wiki:
**400 edits by June 1, 2007
**Contributor, measured by time of first edit, for three months prior
to June 1, 2007 (that is, by March 1, 2007)
**Not blocked

These are the same criteria which are still documented on all our help pages.

I think that at this point I must demand that you present evidence
that no parties with influence over any change to the election
criteria or the ability to influence any determination of the validity
of the election process have not had and will not have  access to
election results prior to exerting that influence.

I have heard rumors that there are plans to selectively invalidate the
election depending on the results.  I had previously attributed these
rumors to the typical paranoid ramblings of the crowd and assumed they
had no credability. But if we have suddenly changed the stated
eligibility criteria without justification I must consider the
possibility that the rumor has some merit.

> The voter lists we sent to Software in the Public Interest (our third
> party election partner) initially were wrong. There was a bug in the
> edit counting program and the sent list contained every account with
> 201 or more edits, instead of 400 or more edits.

Wait. Did you simply misspeak above?   Is the situation only that the
edit count criteria was misapplied and nothing has been changed from
the official election rules.

If that is the case then there is no problem, although more care is
required in the communications sent.

(and I might like to mention that my mailing did not suffer from this
particular flaw)