[members-discuss] Request to amend the RIPE NCC Articles of Association

Hello everybody,

as a result of last weeks AGM and an intense discussion on the voting procedure I would like to request the Executive Board to put forward a resolution for the next General Meeting to abandon paper ballot voting.

Reasoning:

I inadvertently registered for electronic voting instead of paper ballot voting.  By the time I realized my mistake I found out that the BigPulse electronic voting had already been set up and I couldn't change anymore.  Then, after the AGM on Wednesday I actually was grateful, not having to make a choice in a matter of minutes, in order to turn in the paper ballots.  I was also grateful that electronic voting only started at the end of Wednesdays AGM session, effectively preventing prematurely turned in votes.  Not only took it some time and consideration putting six candidates in a row of preference.  To make a good choice it was also essential to listen what each candidate had to say.  I had enough time to sleep over it, talk to others, and re-read documents considering what had been said.  This all added to a much more reflected vote.

This also eases a number of things:

Proxy Votes: No paper necessary anymore-register for electronic voting and forward the registration confirmation (which then should already contain the link to access the poll) to your proxy.

Counting paper ballots: This is a manual process by which the cast paper ballots get entered into the same electronic voting system that the electronically cast votes end up in.  With 5 resolutions plus 6 candidates times 119 paper ballots and a 4 (or more) eyes verification this takes hours of possibly error-prone monotony.

That said, with the significant increase in the number of registered voters that the possibility to vote electronically and remotely stimulated, the possibility to vote by show of hands or acclamation seems at least questionable to me, since this would exclude the remote participants.  This should be dropped as well.

Best regards,
Ulf Kieber
Head of NOC
green.ch AG

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