Dear Members of the General Body,
Last month we conducted the annual general body meeting that included the election of the new board of trustees. Election was completed and the certified results were announced on the same day. Since then we have received a few complaints from folks regarding the conduct of the election. The election team has responded to each one of them in thoughtful manner. The team has felt that it is very important to maintain the sanctity of the election process and conduct a thorough investigation of every complaint. For full disclosure and transparency we would like share with rest of the general body all the questions and our responses. The goal of this not only to assuage the folks that had concerns but also to make sure nothing tarnishes the mandate received by the duly elected board members.
Were the AGM
Notification done properly?
As per constitution we are required to send the notice 4 weeks prior to the actual meeting. This was done in a timely manner. We sent notifications to 509 addresses which is the complete list of valid addresses we had in our membership list. We used a service to automatically print the notice, the individual addresses and the postage. Besides mailing the notice, the notification was also prominently placed on the website. http://www.htccwa.org/newsite/agm2009/
Why did some folks
not receive their AGM Notices?
Yes it is true that some folks did not receive the AGM Notices. This is most likely due to the fact that we haven't used our addresses for while to reach out to our members. We are not surprised that some of them are not up to date. If some members did not receive their notification it is most likely due to bad data in our system and not malicious intent. Moving forward we are maintaining these addresses in more formal manner and working on plan to get them updated. We are also going to use them to connect with members on more regular basis through regular newsletter mailing hopefully we will discover issues sooner than later. We have also since discovered that there were some valid addresses to which the notification did not arrive. We are actively following up with service we used for mailing the notifications to give us more details so we can track the reasons and make things even better next year.
Were the election
candidate registration changes explained properly in the AGM Notice?
Following is the instruction included in AGM noticed mailed and placed on the website.
“Those people desiring to be nominated for the election are encouraged to pre register with the secretary. While registration is not a requirement for this year's election, early submission of information will allow the candidate to have a web-page up on the HTCC web site as early as May 7, 2009. We may not be able to put up a web-page for the candidate if the pre-registration is received after 8pm on May 10, 2009, so please register as soon as possible. This page will be accessible from http://www.htccwa.org/agm2009. You can start the registration process by sending an email with your name to secretary@htccwa.org. Even though a candidate has pre-registered, they will still have to be nominated on the floor of the AGM and accept the nomination.”
We feel that ample information was provided regarding the registration and each of the candidates had other opportunities (like visiting the website or talking to an existing board member) to gain the understanding required to participate in the election.
Is it true that
candidate registration was not handled properly and certain favored candidates
got up on website sooner than others?
The pre-registration process, which was optional, has three distinct steps. The first one is informing the secretary about the candidate's interest. Once that is done then secretary sends email requesting information to put on the website and finally the candidate sends the secretary the information to put on the website. As we are putting their name publicly we do need the last email from the candidate. All candidates that did not get their name on website did not complete the last step of this process and this included one of the winning candidates. The secretary shared exact time lines with committee that corroborates this.
Finally the pre-registration was not utilized well this year with few candidates doing it only on Saturday and those few that did pre-register had the information on website very late on that day to have had any kind of material impact on the election results.
Awards were given
by election committee to some candidates in the GBM. Did it provide those
candidates an unfair advantage?
In the first place the award was not given by the election committee. It was exclusively the decision of the chairman to recognize people in his team that helped him with a successful year. While the board was consulted on determining the list of winners there was no voting as it was not a board decision. It was the chairman's award and fully paid for by him personally. Now as the election committee we looked at specifically if the awards impacted the results. There were 3 candidates that were given the awards – Subbu, Bhargavi, Ganesh Prakash. Out of those only 1 was a winner. The number of voters who had all 3 in their list (assuming they made the decision based on the award) were 32 and almost significant portion of the 32 voted for other losing candidates. From purely numerical standpoint the awards did not alter the results.
How were the Ballot
Instructions provided during the AGM?
The election commissioner provided instructions at the time of the GBM. He has done this for 4 years now and has fine tuned his approach to providing this information. In addition the ballot itself had very well written instructions on how one must cast their votes. During the election volunteers were available to help folks that had trouble with the ballot. Compared to previous years this year there were no ballot errors at all. This leads us to believe that combination of clear instructions and simple ballot was reason for lower error rate. There is very little evidence to support that there was confusion among the electorate with regards to the ballots.
Why did choose a
ballot design of combining the board election and amendments?
The decision to have single ballot that combined both board election and amendments was not made lightly. When designing the ballot one has to consider the ease of use for both the voter and then eventually the folks managing the ballot counting & verification. Multiple sheets (stapled together) or large folded sheets make manageability of the ballot harder and have higher likely hood of folks filling in partial ballot as discovery becomes a problem. The single sheet ballot design's benefits far outweigh any downsides of confusion through compactness. Contrary to some suggestions the election team is not aware of any rules that prohibit us from combining the two into single sheet.
How were the
ballots secured prior to the election?
The ballots were printed as close to election as possible. Each ballot had unique ballot ID assigned and printed as bar code on top right corner. The ballots were handed to the election commissioner Deepak Om right from printer's office and were in his custody till the morning of the election. 600 ballots were printed, 240 + 2(reissue) were issued. All ballots are accounted for and in commissioner's custody now.
Could single voter
have received multiple ballots?
The election software tracked whether a ballot was issued to member based on their membership card id. This allowed us to know exactly how many members were issued more than one ballot. 2 members requested fresh ballots as they had to make significant changes. These two ballots were tracked as such and old ballots issued were not counted. As the total number of ballots matched the total number of cards issued on that day and we had a robust system of tracking, we can say with conviction that no voters cast multiple ballots.
Is it true that the
voters could not cast their ballots in privacy?
Yes, it is true there was no privacy for folks casting their ballots. One should however realize that the ability for folks to vote in privacy has never been there in any of the past election. So while we agree that environment was not setup for private voting, I am not sure it is sufficient grounds to recall the election. I am confident the board will work towards providing the right level of privacy or at least articulate what the expectation should be. It is important to balance the needs of fair election process with practical consideration of managing and running an election in the allotted time.
Were the voters
influenced as they were casting their ballots?
While there may be some truth to these claims but when election commissioner tried to resolve this issue it was clear that voters desired the suggestion from these folks. Clearly the act by these certain members of general body may not be in the right spirit, it is not actionable unless a significant number of voters complain of intimidation. We have till date not received a single complaint from the voter indicating that they were personally intimidated.
Were some ballots
modified after the voters had cast the votes?
As we mentioned earlier two ballots were reissued to the voters. In addition 6 ballots had corrections on them. 4 of them had one change and 2 had multiple changes. All the changes appeared to be normal human errors and did not raise the flag of any improper ballot manipulation. No ballots were modified after they were put in the ballot box.
Could the
volunteers stationed near the ballot box potentially read the votes as the
ballots were cast?
Unfortunately it is hard to verify this claim or for that matter avoid accidental discovery of vote depending on how folks have folded the ballot at the time of deposit. In order to guarantee the security of the ballot box we are required to station a volunteer. Typically, we advise our volunteers to ask the voters to deposit the ballot paper by themselves into the box. Even if the volunteer was able to see the choice made by the voter, the mere act of seeing the vote does not change the vote and therefore does not impact the actual result.
Did few folks get
their ballots after election closed at 4:00pm?
This is one area where our election commissioner was very particular. He was standing at the ballot counter at about 3:50 pm to monitor the situation. He was monitoring the time on his cell phone and the last ballot was issued at 4:00 pm (before the clock turned 4:01 pm to be precise). Actually another person showed up at 4:02 pm and was denied a ballot.
How were the
ballots counted and verified?
Each ballot was scanned by the volunteer and votes entered in an application. Each of these recorded votes were then stored in a database. A different set of volunteers rescanned the same ballot. The application retrieved the recorded vote. The recorded vote was compared by volunteer with ballot to do second pass verification. If there was discrepancy the whole process was redone for that particular ballot again. Once the votes were recorded then they were loaded into excel and results computed. In order to further verify we manually counted the recorded votes for multiple candidates to ensure that it matched what excel was generating.
Was there block
voting in the current election?
By block voting we mean that
there were patterns of votes that appeared multiple times during the counting
process. In that sense, yes, there was block voting in the current election.
This however is not something unique to this year's election. The board had set
up a committee to evaluate the election process and suggest improvement months
before the current election. The research done by this team clearly established
that block voting occurred in last year's election too.
Was the election
participation poor this year?
Last year there 234 valid votes and this year we had 240. So there is nothing to support the claim that fewer people turned up to vote this year.
What is the final
verdict on the election?
After having reviewed all the
complaints the election team believes there isn't sufficient cause to justify
recalling the election. So the election results stand as certified on the day
of the election.
Was the election
fair?
When evaluating the fairness of election process it is most important to look at it from the voter's perspective and not the candidate. When there are issues in election process the problem is not that certain candidate was not elected but rather certain set of voters were not able to get their choice of representation. It is very subtle distinction but very important one. In this year's election 87% of the voters voted for at least 2 of candidates that were finally elected, 95% at least one and only 5% of voters were unable to get single candidate of their choice in the board. Compare this to last year where only 72% voters got 2 of their candidates elected. In that sense it is hard to find fault with the election as most folks got representation. A discussion based on the 6 candidates who won and 6 who didn't is not right way to do this evaluation.
Can we improve the
election process?
Definitely it can be improved. This year we made lot of changes that made process in our opinion much better than past years. Besides electing 6 candidates, we voted on 8 ballot issues. We provided voters a longer time window and easier way to cast their ballots. The whole counting and verification process despite the increased number of issues was done faster and more reliably than past years. Despite all the progress, we do realize that there is lot of room for improvement. We have learned a lot from this year's election and I am sure that will help us make it even better next year.
Thank you,