There a two main issues here, I think, that there is some conflation of.

1. The first is ensuring that those who _are_ active are properly listed as 
such in preparation for any votes. Clearly there were some flaws in the 
system used for the charter vote as at least two or three people missed their 
opportunity to confirm their status during check-in.

Having a single system with a stable source address for all official major 
announements of "admin" materials such s suggested by Dan woud, I think, help 
in this.

2. The fact that 38% of the membership who had checked-in did not then 
exercise their allocated vote. This is primarily a social and not a technical 
problem, I think. Yes, perhaps some of these missed the voting message, but 
the technical capacity to have the ballot re-issued if one missed it the 
first time around and the numerous calls for people to engage in the voting 
process means that this was more a failure of will than a failure of 
technical communications.

For this one, I think we need to investigate more. I assume that although the 
details of how people voted is held by the voting system securely, that the 
identity of the voters (and therefore also the non-voters) is available. 
Accordingly, I think that after the election of the new chair, they should 
contact the non-voting confirmed members for the charter vote and enquire of 
them what happened. Without solid data we cannot have any real belief that 
any action we take would be effective.

For example the 38% who checked in but did not vote may have objected to the 
charter so badly that they felt that rather than voting against, which would 
mean a simple majority will would rule the outcome, that by not voting that 
the threshold might not be met, thereby defeating the motion even if a 
majority of voters (or even a majority of checked-in members) had voted in 
favour. This possibility should be avoid by preventing perverse incentives. 
For example, if 51% of the checked-in members had voted for the charter to be 
accepted, it should have been accepted. Assuming any vote not expressed was a 
vote against is not unreasonable, but compounding that by requiring a 
super-majority to actually vote produces a moral hazard in the system.

-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      [log in to unmask]
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/