One year until next election. (2012)
Chris Collins
After all the experience of holding these elections for the decade, this upcoming one can be the smoothest
today. The most transparent. The most democratic. The most efficient and cost effective.
The voter list is always a huge problem. Isn't it the case that on the very first day of the one-year
membership window, there are zero eligible members. And each day from then until the end
of the membership window each donor/contributor gets the membership and place on the
voter rolls.
Wouldn't it be smart to sort of start with a zero in the database, and more closely and carefully maintain
and manage these up until it needs to be compiled into a voter roll.
Alex
Hello, I was a member of this committee last year as the PNB representative from WBAI.
I am sure you have gone over this already but allow me to enumerate what I see as the problems with membership lists:
1. Duplicate memberships. (Eg, the same person at the same address can have a slightly different spelling of his name or the apartment might be specified in one case and not the other. Mailing houses have software to eliminate those kind of things. Generally we rely on the mailing houses to clean up our membership lists. Why not do our own cleanup before we even send the list to the mailing house?
2. “Gift” memberships. These are not legal under our bylaws but we seem to get some anyway. Typical is someone asking for memberships for his or her family members at $25 a crack. This could be quite innocent but it is also open to the abuse known as buying votes.
3. Membership waivers. Our bylaws give LSB’s the option to provide “waivers”. This is a constant source of abuse and has been so at WBAI. The Elections Supervisor must insist that no waiver can be granted without solid evidence that the person in question really meets the eligibility criteria and he or she cannot just take the word of some committee that that is the case. Otherwise there is the possibility of another way to buy votes, and this time for free.
4. Verification of staff membership. This is by far the most important thing to do. The staff election is the most open to abuse and since a staff vote counts about as much as 20 listener votes it is also the most tempting target for those who would abuse the system. No elections supervisor should be approved who is not prepared to independently verify the membership status of all unpaid staff in consultation with the General Manager. It’s that simple but this has never been done.
I am not sure how you propose to address any of these items with the idea of starting the database from zero. And since management has to keep a membership list of current members, regardless if there is an election or not, you are in effect asking someone to maintain another, separate list although obviously related to the active membership list. Who will be doing that? I am sure you can probably program memsys to create a new database from the old one and eliminating all those who whose membership expires before the due date while adding new members during the year but I am not sure what the gain would be.
I think the best way to make sure we have a good election in 2012 (and not a repeat of last year’s disaster) is to make sure we hire good elections supervisors. It might mean that we need to pay more for quality people than we have been doing in the past. Also the Elections Supes might need more start up time than they had in the past and certainly can use more support locally from staff and volunteers and management.
If you agree with some of these suggestions it would be something you might consider recommending to the PNB and the sooner we start planning for the 2012 elections the better.
Alex Steinberg
WBAI listener representative on the PNB (who will NOT be running in the 2012 election due to being termed out.)
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Chris Collins
> I am not sure how you propose to address any of these items with the idea of starting the database from zero.
> And since management has to keep a membership list of current members, regardless if there is an election
> or not, you are in effect asking someone to maintain another, separate list although obviously related to the
> active membership list. Who will be doing that? I am sure you can probably program memsys to create a new
> database from the old one and eliminating all those who whose membership expires before the due date while
> adding new members during the year but I am not sure what the gain would be.
update it with new information that comes in. This wouldn't be necessary. The memsys voter roll database
is completely empty on day one. (when is day one anyway? It's right around now sometime isn't it?)
What if the list of membership qualifying donations were updated monthly throughout the year. If today is the
first day of the membership cycles, there is an empty database. One December 3, 2011 each station
reports their donors over the last 30 days. On Jan 3, 2012 each unit reports its last thirty days, and so on
through the end of the membership window.
The first check to clear after day one, in effect, becomes, member number one for the purposes of the
voter rolls.
If the Election Supervisor keeps this, perhaps his/her first steps could be to bring this up to date as of
May or whenever they are selected, and then they take the monthly update through the rest of the period.
Among many other problems, the voter rolls have always been one of them. I agree the power of a staff
vote is a problem too. Maybe this monthly update of a zero staff database, according to their eligibility
could make it more transparent too.
Carolyn Birden
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
Dom Helder Camara