I hate to keep beating on this issue but I have gotten several private comments concerning online voting. I encourage the people that experienced problems to submit their concerns to NAFA.
Executive Director
I realize that the Executive Director was running unopposed, but several people told me that they wanted to exercise their right to vote No. However, when voting online and selecting No for the Executive Director their votes were changed to Yes. Apparently, the Executive Director isn’t as popular as everyone thinks but I guess we will never know. That’s probably why the Executive Director’s votes were not shown in the voting results.
Clear Directions
If you read my Voting Analysis post, you know that I made several conclusions about why some clubs didn’t vote or maybe only voted for 1 or 2 candidates. The concern is whether the delegates knew that they could vote for 3 candidates. Was the instruction clear or did the voters decide not to vote for 3 candidates, or was there a probably with the online form? If the hard copy ballots that were returned showed an equal percentage of votes not cast it could be assumed that, the voter was exercising their right not to vote.
Maybe the online form needs to be modified so the voter must choose Yes or No for each candidate before the form can be submitted. It would make it easier after the voting to determine whether the voter was just exercising their right to not vote.
Things Good To Know
1. Clubs that did not vote - I know it’s probably unlikely that a club out there would fess up and actually say that they didn’t vote, but I would like to know why they didn’t vote. Not to berate them but just to find out why, did they receive the ballot(s), did they forget, etc. I’m sure that NAFA would like to know also.
2. Clubs that did vote - Of the clubs that did vote were the online instructions clear; did they encounter problems with the online form; did the hard copy ballot have clear instructions.
3. NAFA Questions - Things that would be good to know from NAFA are how many ballots showed up late and were not counted, of the ballots received, were there some that were not counted, and if ballots were not counted what was the reason for not counting them.
4. How can voting be improved - What suggestions can you make to improve the voting process?
Most likely, we will never know the answers to these questions but until we do the problems will not be corrected any time soon.
Larry
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6 comments ↓
Based on what we know on how votes can be “cast” for someone electronically, and skewed in one favor or another, I think having a paper trail in voting is probably the best route to avoid tampering with the votes.
Our National polling recently, for example, has shown that without that paper ballot how can you do an accurate recount. A person could even hold a postion without having actually won. (Imagine that!)
Flyball too, as much as we’d like to believe differently, but have seen over and over has it’s own politics. It’s crappy, but it’s there, in all aspects. Within regions,Clubs,teams, and in some clubs like my former, includes politics in line ups and training time.
Candidates should be listed. Perhaps adding the modification, ” choosing to abstain” on each section to be voted on along with the candidate’s names would simplify it.
As I’ve stated previously, I have never seen a ballot. So perhaps this is already on the form.
If it isn’t currently on a ballot, it would be very simple to add and then you could have some sort of indication that the votes were intentionally not cast, and not out of error or oversite.
When our club finally earns the right to vote, I hope we choose to send a paper ballot. But we’ll vote on that as a club desiscion too!
On the whole I like the Nafa voting system better than the ufli system… it seems so much more democratic and american…
U-FLI is a private business where NAFA is a nonprofit organization. Both are based in democratic values but one entrepreneurial, and you can’t get much more American than that.
My question with the “no” vote is where does it really get you? Yes, you may send a message to NAFA leadership, but so what? Unless you have more/different folks to run, I don’t see where a “no” vote does that much good. Seems we’d be better served to get folks who we feel are after what we feel is the best interest of the sport and the organization to accept a nomination to run.
Beth
When voting online, a no vote tells it was intentional. You can even pop up a warning if the voter only selects 1 or 2 candidates. Maybe you should be able to leave a comment also or maybe a write in candidate. I’m just throwing things out there but I do think it’s important to know why someone with a ballot didn’t vote and why a ballot was returned incomplete. Was it a mistake or intentional? I know that not voting may just be voter apathy.
In one of the blogs or the comments, I read where someone refered to the online voting problem that occured when voting for the ED - that even when choosing no one it cast a vote for the one candidate. It was speculated as to whether or not this was a gliche. I think not. I think that if the possiblitiy was available to show the number of votes that did not support this candidate, the vote could have shown a greater support for no one than the person running. While it doesn’t matter since even one vote would get him re-elected, seeing the true number of nonsupporters would be a harsh reality to face since it would change nothing.
As I stated above - this is what I think!
Eli
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