On Fri, 26 Aug 2016, Mueller, Milton L wrote:

> Dan, Neal, Enrique, Dan:

hi Dr. Mueller, and other members,

although you didn'at address the "rest of the membership" you previously
chastised me for speaking my reaction to the outcome of the compromise in
the EC.

now it is you who won't let it lie during the election process.  so you
appear to choose to let those who agree with your version of the NOTA
option to continue to speak and find an emerging agreement.  alas, this
is not the way to gain more participation.

> Seems there is an emerging agreement that to do NoTA properly the ballot should have been redesigned. I just want you to know (see the minutes) that that is exactly what the backers of the appeal argued for strenuously, but for some reason Tapani would not accept it and since we were operating on a full consensus basis the appellants had to accept the current, flawed NoTA voting rules as part of the compromise.

now i choose to speak again with my suggestion for changes for future 
elections -- note that i'm not decrying the compromise -- i support and
appreciate that the compromise was made and should settle things for
this election (at least for this stage of this election).

> To that I have to add that those who contend this all doesn't matter because "we have 4 sterling candidates" who are all going to be elected anyway - that to me is bollocks. We insisted on a NOTA option because we didn't want anyone to win simply because they were the only ones on the ballot. We wanted to empower voters to express their lack of support in a consequential way.

i note that our deliberations are to reach consensus.  and i believe that
our elections can be made to reflect this more accurately than NOTA for
each candidate.   it makes no sense in general English meaning to say
NOTA for each and every candidate.  what i think would be superior is
that for each candidate on the ballot, there are three boxes:
   yes,
   no objection,
   no.

this gives the consensus result that you can vote four ways for each 
candidate, and the results can be reported with all four choices available
for review for each candidate.    the four are yes, no objection, no, and
abstain.

with only a box for the candidate's name and NOTA, there is no way to
distinguish between the no objection and abstention options.

offering a recorded count of all four options will help guide the election
results to achieve the intended consequences of agreeing with the positions
of a candidate, to reject the positions, to be more neutral with no objection
but to say the candidate needs improvement to receive an affirmative vote in
the future, and to abstain as not having enough information to make an
informed choice or just desiring not to have their opinion of this candidate
recorded.

i was educated at a college run by the Society of Friends and consensus
had only the definition of what we call in ICANN as full consensus.
Avri mentored me a few times when i was on a working groups of the
consensus mechanism as practiced in ICANN deliberations -- the discinction
of "i can't live with that" and "i don't like it but i can live with that",
or abstain when you can't make up your mind on the information available to
you at the time and don't want to delay the progress of the group.   this
spirit of consensus can be carried over into our electorial process by
the above suggestion.

i hope my suggestion is received as constructive criticism of the two-
box NOTA option.

-ron