[Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 40, Issue 9

[Andrew Gray]

On 03/07/07, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't see the difference between a voter drive on en.wp, and the
> other projects having direct action drives on them stating "GO VOTE!"
> and having similar campaigns.
>
> Why is this actually an issue? The email apparently does not say
> "Vote for XYZ and not  ABC". It just says go vote.
>
> Why do you feel this is A) noteworthy, and B) anything we should be
> concerned about?

An analogy.

When I ran elections for a student union - and, I quietly brag, got
the highest turnout in the country - we had an interesting structural
issue to handle. The electorate was fragmented into a dozen colleges,
and it was generally accepted that a candidate from a specific college
had a decent first shot at their votes*. People wouldn't vote solely
along collegiate lines, of course, but all other things being equal
the fact that they'd recognise someone as someone they sort of knew
would tip the balance. These colleges varied substantially, both by
size and apatheticness.

The similarity to projects and candidates here should be pretty clear,
I hope! (Except that, for linguistic & cultural reasons, the
candidate-project link is probably a shade closer)

As a side-effect, one of our most lengthy "theological arguments" was
on whether or not it was unfairly influencing the vote to allow
candidates to say which they were affiliated with, and if not how on
earth you could practically enforce this. We kept varying this; no
good answer.

When the actual running of the election rolled around, the only
practical way to get turnout was to devolve the "advertising" to the
collegiate level - our people had substantially better access to
students through that method than any central body did. There was a
single person, with a couple of assistants, responsible for getting
the electorate in each group turned out.

As a result of that, a second-order factor on how well any given
candidate would do was the competence and enthusiasm of *one single
person* in their college. This was, basically, an unavoidable feature
of the system, but as the way to "balance" it was for the candidates
to enthuse all the others harder, we felt it was self-correcting :-)

I wonder if this might not be a model to embrace next time - name a
committee on each project responsible for whipping up the vote from
that project, and leave them to it so long as they don't a) involve or
endorse any given candidate; b) go overboard.

This avoids the "omg, canvassing on enwp" "but there's canvassing on
dewp" "it's different" sort of disputes, and also helps avoid the
inherent inefficiencies of a central group trying to both run the
elections and promote them across dozens of projects.

Thoughts?

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk

* Or would get an abnormally *low* vote from them, depending on how
good they were at pissing people off...