board77

Well in this case a thread was started encouraging people to vote at 6:52 GMT - 52 minutes after the deadline. People then came and voted in good faith. It was only realized afterwards that the deadline was 6:00 GMT not midnight GMT and it was already too late. It was an honest mistake.

I think an exception should be made in this case, but that in the future midnight GMT should be the standard end-time for all votes.

Well, Faramond and Alatar tend to be our conservative Justices and if they agree that it would be more improper to ignore the last few votes than to count them, and everyone else seems to agree with this, we should go ahead and count them.

Has anyone sent a PM to Rowanberry? I will still need an accurate count for posting the voting numbers in Michel Delving.

And before this thread is retired to the History Forum, the results of the vote should be added to the ballot in the first post.

Um ... oh, poor Rangers ... there's some more work associated with this as well. This is the first Binding Vote we've held since we opened the board, so the Administrator i.d. has to start a new thread in the History Forum called "Directory of Binding Votes." The first post should explain that it's a directory to Binding Votes held after June 27, 2005. Then enter a link to this thread, and I've also been putting (just below the link) the date that the thread was opened (copied and pasted from the first post). Whoever does this can look at one of the other directory threads and see how it is set up.

I believe there's still some other clean-up work to do in the History Forum. I'll check that now and post what needs to be done in the Ranger thread of this forum.

Thanks, guy!

Jn

I'm glad the Loremasters and the "Conservative Judges" agree on counting all votes, especially if this makes the difference in making or not making the quorum. Personally, the deadline of 6PM GMT doesn't seem too intuitive when you are 7 hours behind. At least midnight gives those of us in the Western Hemisphere almost a full workday to sneak in and vote.

Another thought - for future votes, it might be helpful to time-zone-challenged folks like me to include a "closing time" schedule for a few major timezones (major in terms of the number of b77ers who live there).

This whole thing reminds me of the Washington State governers vote last November.

Seriously, was it so hard to read the thread atop every forum telling you to vote? Yes the instruction was a bit ambigious, but anyone who can read and tell time should have figured it out. Personally I don't think any of the votes received by anyone after 6PM GMT on Aug 22 should be counted. It was stated as such, and if a Q wasn't achieved by the stated cutoff time then so be it, that is the result.

Of course maybe you will want to wait a week to make sure any votes sent to the various Rangers before the cutoff are counted. But to count late votes, it just isn't right in my opinion.

Maybe next time, the cutoff time should be made bold, large, and in red.

The confusion is at least partially my doing, for which I apologize. When I gave the GMT cutoff, I believe I worked the time difference in my head BACKWARDS from what it actually is. I knew I should have gone to one of those time zone web pages...

I am also of the opinion that the email that goes out should be the standard in general, since it, well, goes to everyone.

Snowdog, the reason many people didn't vote immediately was because they had no idea how to vote. They were stuck on the fence so they took every second they could to think about it. Also you wouldn't know this since you haven't been around that long, practically every single vote we've had has ended at midnight GMT so to think the same thing was going to occur with this vote isn't exactly a huge leap.

When I went reading through the first post, I couldn't find a time, I only found this:

Quote:

Dating from the last grammar edit of the ballot wording, that means voting will open on August 12 and run through the 22nd.

Could someone point me to where Ax mentioned the time?

Jnyusa wrote:

Has anyone sent a PM to Rowanberry? I will still need an accurate count for posting the voting numbers in Michel Delving.
Jn

Jny,

Yes, I Pmed Rowan last night and have now heard back from her. She did not receive any additional ballots, so the total number received remains at 41.

We seem to mostly be in agreement that the votes should be counted, so if Alatar or another Ranger could double check my count to verify the results we can put this to rest once and for all.

Looking at said time zone map, I can state that I was indeed thinking 1800 GMT= 2400 CDT (my zone), when it's actually 1200 CDT.

So I actually got it backwards on both counts, since I WANTED 2400 GMT.

Argh.

Count the damn votes. And I would say so whether a quorum was in the balance or not. People should not be penalized for my stupid mistake.

Ax, if it hepls at all, I can't even understand the math in your last post. And I agree, we should count votes.

Let's stop for a moment and think. Which is more important to us as a community - to stick to the letter of the law, or to make sure that the vote outcome reflects the actual preference of the board members?

I'd like to second the suggestion that for Binding Votes and Charter Amendments, the voting deadline be given in GMT and also in at least one US time zone, just to be sure everyone understands what the deadline is.

Frelga--

Sometimes the letter of the law is the only thing that keeps people honest. But in this case I think we all WANTED to be honest, and that my inability to remember which way the Earth rotates got in the way.

Cerin--

That would be a useful tool for helping to alert people there was a problem.

Agreeing with what Frelga said ... when we run into glitches like this the guiding principle, imo, should be giving voice to everyone who seems to deserve one legitimately. Giving voice to the community is more important than having synchronized watches. Within limits of course.

It is also the case that the B77 clock is about ten minutes slow.

I'm going to add a timetable to the committee handbook so that committees can paste it into their threads and show the ending of the vote in all zones where we have members. If votes always end at midnight GMT, then the info will be the same everytime and people will get used to it.

On the other side of the question, I'm glad to hear Snowdog's voice added to the 'strict interpretation' crowd. It has been very valuable to us, imo, to have strict interpretations defended every time this has been an issue because it does give weight to the charter and guarantees that expectations are not being violated every time we turn around.

Jn

Snowdog, thanks for piping up with your opinion. I know a lot of times when a bunch of people express the same opinion its hard to express a contrary one, but it is really important for people to be able to feel comfortable enough to do so. So bravo for you.

However, I think that one thing that most of us are taking into account that would not be as meaningful to you is the fact that virtually all of the previous binding votes that we have done did end at midnight GMT. There was 19 charter ratification votes and they all closed at midnight GMT. It would not be as noticable to you, because all but 7 of them were completed before you arrived here, but it would not be unreasonable for people to assume that that standard was being adhered to. It is a maxim of the law that form should not be raised above substance. I agree with you that it would be better if people did not wait until the last second, but I do believe that the votes that people reasonably believed to be cast before the vote closed should be counted.

Voronwë_the_Faithful wrote:

It is a maxim of the law that form should not be raised above substance.

Disclaimer: Since Sunday morning I have slept a total of five hours, thanks to end-of-m77t and travel reasons. It is now Tuesday at 11:52 AM. So, please forgive me for being slow here.

I feel that I'm missing something - practically speaking, why are we concerned about whether or not to count the late votes? Is it purely for record keeping? Am I misreading that we would reach the exact same result in any case? If so, why can't we just chalk it up to experience and either use the standard GMT cutoff that we were using, or make flashing banners with the correct cutoff time for future votes?

Like I said, I'm really tired. Sorry if I have missed something obvious, as I probably have.

I believe making the quorum on this vote has to do with making something much easier for the official mayor...Jn posted something about it earlier in this thread. I'll see if I can find it for you.

edit: http://www.phpbber.com/phpbb/viewtopic. ... d77#118224

Yeah I know, I'm the new guy and so I take each vote on whatever on its own merit. I read the issue, and I read the voting parameters. It wasn't really that hard for me.
Like I said in my very first post, this place takes an interesting approach to online community governance, and its interesting to watch it in action.

TP--

You are correct, except that maintaining the status quo because no quorum sends a slightly different message than voting to maintain the status quo, I believe. It also would leave the matter more open to future discussion, I fear.

tp, we didn't reach a quorum which is why we are discussing counting the votes after the deadline. The deadline was stated by Ax as 1800 GMT, and a lot of people might not have read that, and just assumed they had until midnight GMT.

Axordil wrote:

It also would leave the matter more open to future discussion, I fear.

I know this is what I would like to avoid. Let this be the final rehashing.