Dear Amr

Thanks for your comments. My thoughts are:

We need to go religiously by the charter and what the NCSG-EC does. If 
we don't like it, there are well established ways to challenge it.

As brief the description of the voting procedure might be, they need to 
be upheld. What happened with this election happened and we should 
accept it. We should move on, accept the mistakes that have been made, 
and rejoice in the thought of the lessons learned and spend our energies 
to change what needs to be changed.

There are no wrongs that need to be made right, only lessons to be 
learned and implemented after a thorough discussion. That is where the 
NOTA discussion belongs. It certainly does not belong to a time after 
the election started.

Its time to move on, its time to be constructive.

Klaus


On 8/22/2016 4:04 PM, Amr Elsadr wrote:
> Hi Klaus,
>
> You’re setting up your interpretation of the charter as something that has been “established”. I, for one, do not agree with the premise you claim is established. NOTA has no charter standing in itself, but nor does the charter in any way at all prohibit its use. If you can point me to the language in the charter that supports your claim, I’d be happy to reconsider my position.
>
> There is only a small section in the charter (https://community.icann.org/display/gnsononcomstake/Charter) that describes how elections take place. Section 4.2:
>
>> All NCSG votes will be held using an online voting system to be determined, approved and supervised by the NCSG-EC. Membership classification for voting will be based on the official membership list, which must include the category of membership and must be verified before any vote.
>
> Since I’ve been a member of the NCSG, the EC has always determined, approved and supervised the online voting system, which included NOTA. This year, there is a suggestion to change how NOTA is being used, but it hasn’t been approved by the EC (via full consensus as required).
>
> I’d be interested to read your thoughts on this.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Amr
>
>> On Aug 22, 2016, at 3:38 PM, Klaus Stoll <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am sorry but I am a little bit confused.
>>
>> First, it has been established that NOTA votes have now foundation in the Charter, but that is is a addition that was thought would be useful and has become now a habit, but has no real legal status in the charter.
>>
>> Now this is ignored by saying that if there are more NOTA votes then actual votes, voting has to start again, which gives the NOTA vote a legal status and actual effect that is not anchored in the charter.
>>
>> Did I understand this right? If yes, we should stick with the interpretation that the NOTA vote is only an indication but has no legal weight. If we give NOTA votes legal weight and it happens the NOTA votes will require a re-election, in this case we open the door to every kind of legal objections. It is not a good idea to try to define the legality of votes and try to establish rules during the election process now.
>>
>> The current process is flawed, we need to fix it before the next election, BUT we can not start defining the rules during the election itself and also we can not give precedence the weight of a principle established in the charter.
>>
>> Fully committed to help work this out.
>>
>> Yours
>>
>> Klaus
>>
>> On 8/22/2016 8:46 AM, avri doria wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> The way I always thought NOTA worked in a ranking election as we have
>>> for council, is that if someone picked NOTA instead of one candidate,
>>> they were saying they preferred no one to that person.
>>>
>>> If they picked NOTA instead of 2 or 3 they preferred NOTA to any of them.
>>>
>>> After the counting, the top n win (3 in this case), except that anyone
>>> who got fewer votes than NOTA would not.  If there were fewer people
>>> that 3 above NOTA, then we would need another election to fill the empty
>>> slot (s).
>>>
>>> Our various EC were supposed to write procedures defining all of this
>>> stuff years ago.  Unfortunately they have functioned more as membership
>>> committee than an EC doing the chartered work of proposing procedures as
>>> defined in the charter.
>>>
>>> avri
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 22-Aug-16 08:23, James Gannon wrote:
>>>> Hi Tapani,
>>>>
>>>> In the absence of something in the charter, can you clarify what the situation is with regards to NOTA votes if NOTA places above a natural person in the final vote what is the situation?
>>>>
>>>> -James
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 22/08/2016, 10:54, "NCSG-Discuss on behalf of Tapani Tarvainen" <[log in to unmask] on behalf of [log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 09:44:10AM +0000, James Gannon ([log in to unmask]) wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Just on process where does the NOTA candidate come from with regards
>>>>>> to our charter, as it seems that the inclusion of a NOTA candidate
>>>>>> is not referenced anywhere.
>>>>> While NotA is not explicitly mentioned in the charter, it has been
>>>>> discussed in the past and an explicit NotA choice has been felt
>>>>> to be useful. I'm only following precedent here.
>>>>>
>>>>>> Also we have a serious election process flaw in that with the manner
>>>>>> in which NOTA is given is makes it impossible for us not to elect a
>>>>>> full slate of candidates if the number of candidates matches the
>>>>>> number of positions, which makes this essentially an acclimation.
>>>>> How so? You can select any number of candidates, up to three.
>>>>>
>>>>> Arguably NotA is redundant in that the practical effect is
>>>>> the same as not selecting any candidates, but in the past
>>>>> it has been considered better to have it as an explicit choice.
>>>>>
>>>>> -- 
>>>>> Tapani Tarvainen
>>>
>>> ---
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