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Username: vb
Date/Time: Tue, July 4, 2000 at 11:06 AM GMT
Browser: Netscape Communicator V4.7 using Windows 98
Score: 5
Subject: Country representation is a big issue

Message:
 

 
       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.

 


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