First of all, the 10% threshold is outrageously high -
it seems chosen on purpose to avoid that any people-supported candidate gets to the
ballot.In Europe there's another big issue with it. While it is true that the
elected candidate will have to represent the whole Europe and to be European in spirit,
given the difficulty in communicating with At Large members it is reasonable that
each potential people-supported candidate will be able to reach mainly the members
from his own country. In other words, in Europe it is really difficult for any candidate
not coming from Germany or the UK to even take part to the elections. Think at candidates
from very big countries such as France, Spain and Italy, or very advanced countries
such as Sweden and Norway: even if they got the support of every single At Large
member in their country, they will only have got one half, one fifth or even one
tenth of the necessary support. And additional rules such as "one endorsement per
member" (which also should be removed) make this even more difficult.
If these
elections are to be democratic and to represent the whole world, then some care should
have been taken in giving all countries a chance to participate. The distribution
of At Large members among the different European countries is very different from
the distribution of Internet users, or of registered domains, or of Internet businesses
or of any other reasonable indicator you could think of. Nomination and voting rules
should try to avoid such misrepresentations, which will in turn lead to undermine
the credibility of the elected Board members and of the ICANN itself.
So I think
that:
- the threshold should be lowered at least to 1%, with a minimum of 20 and
a maximum of 100
- any At Large member should be able to support the nomination
of any number of candidates in his/her region.