Jan 2006 RA Elections Underway

The January 2006 Representative Assembly (RA) elections have begun. To get started, touch the voting booth in the center of the Marktplatz in Neualtenburg in front of the Church. Like last year, after touching the booth, you will be IMed a PIN and a URL to the voting page. Detailed instructions are provided on the voting web page.

New this year, after touching the booth, it will wait 10 seconds after providing the PIN and URL and then offer to open up a browser and log you in automatically. If you choose to use this option, starting the voting process is now as simple as clicking on a single prim.

If the system states that you have already voted and you have not, clear cookies from ".neualtenburg.org". For Safari users, cookies are grouped by the last part of the domain alphabetically (blocks of ".com" first followed by ".gov", ".org", etc.), so you'll find ".neualtenburg.org" near the bottom of your list.


If you are unable to get in world to access the voting booth, contact me by email (Ulrika.Zugzwang@gmail.com) and I will issue you a PIN number manually (absentee voting). If you have any problems, send me an email or post here.

As time allows, I'll post the ratio of votes to the total population. If we have 100% turnout like last year, I'll call the election as soon as the last vote is received.

~Ulrika~

There will be a slight delay. The web server has been taken down for maintenance and should be up within the next 10 minutes.

EDIT: Everything is up and running. I'm actually 30 minutes early this time.

~Ulrika~

This has happened to me each time. If you're using Internet Explorer, click on

Tools/Internet Options/Temporary Internet Files/Delete Cookies

Also, when you enter your first and last name, it *is* case sensitive.

The "auto login" to the voting page is a great and very convenient new feature!


Sudane

There are 5/27 (18%) votes in.

~Ulrika~

could you explain what the elections are for? is it just for your sim? or friends?

The elections are for the Representative Assembly, part of the Neualtenburg government. Eligible voters are the 27 people who own land in the sim.

It's for the citizen of Neualtenburg to elect who is going to be sitting on the representative assembly (our "city council" for the upcoming term.

I'm having a problem voting. And, yes, I've cleared all cookies from neualtenburg.org and www.neualtenburg.org...

On the Voting Rules page, when I click the 'I Attest and am Aware' button I get an error message that says 'Please rank all items. Some choice are still blank'.

It happens in IE as well as in Firefox, and regardless of whether I login to the voting system manually or use the booth. I'm now stuck and have IM'd Ulrika. I wonder if it's because I'm not registered with any faction?

That's exactly what the problem is. I broke the code when I inserted the Voting Rules page.

EDIT: The bug has been fixed. It was a single line of code that was included in the Voting Rules page that shouldn't have been. Those who are undeclared will be able to vote now.

~Ulrika~

Seems to be fine now

Aaron

There are 11/27 (40%) of votes in.

~Ulrika~

OK! Today was the easy part. Those people who are in touch with the forum discussions, who are aware of the elections, have got their votes in, gotten their voting done early. Those folks who are away, or who are perhaps a bit less in touch... they're the ones we have to "get out the vote" with. If anyone runs into, or is in touch with, any other Neualtenburger, PLEASE urge them to vote, if they haven't done so already.

The base number being used is 27, but in fact, one of those persons remains on the list simply because she still has land in Neualtenburg, for sale. She has declared her departure from the City, and she is not at all likely to vote, feeling I think quite rightly that a declared "departee" should not be a voter. I think that a base of 26 would be a more accurate number to use. But, technically, 27 is correct.


Sudane

Disclaimer: blah blah blah, am now married to a fellow Neualtenburger and we share a router, blah blah blah.

That ones for Neualt newbies to look up

Polls are open until Sunday, correct?

Through Thursday Jan 19th.

Aww. You two are a beautiful couple!

No worries on the shared router. This year the controversy will be surrounding Daniel Robertson, Sudane's alt, erm, I mean coworker.

~Ulrika~

Bah! I have made a grievous error. When I was debugging the problem with the voting system above, I removed myself from the SDF to test the code as an unaffiliated voter. Unfortunately, I forgot to add myself back as a member of the SDF.

Since then, it looks like two SDF members have ranked members without me in the list, which is a bad thing because it throws off all the weights. The only solution is to have those two recast their ballots. This only effects SDF rankings and nothing else.

If you're a member of the SDF who voted between 13:00 and 21:00 PST Thursday 12 January (specifically at 13:38 and 18:29 PST), I'll need you to vote again. That's the two SDF members who voted between the bug Aaron reported and now.

You'll need to clear out your cookies and then head to booth/webpage again. If you had an absentee number or remember your PIN, you can skip the booth. I'll preserve the old files but move them, allowing you to vote again. There's no need to post your identities (to maintain privacy), you'll know if you can successfully vote again. If we're short of SDF members at the end of the election, I'll post another reminder.

Apologies and thank you for your patience and understanding.

There are 9/27 (33%) of votes in.

~Ulrika~

I'll ask Satch, who has met Daniel Robertson in RL to some extent through my efforts, to vouch for the fact that he is indeed a colleague of mine in RL. Although Satch has not met me in RL, it is obvious that Daniel is not me.

This election I know that he voted from a machine with an internal IP address behind the same firewall that my office machines are behind, thus displaying the same external IP address that I often do. In this case, tho, I voted from a machine at home, so there should be no correspondence.

I think its appalling that this issue is raised again, as it was last summer; that the supposedly neutral election administrator should begin again prying into the RL identities of residents, compromising privacy of RL identities, and voting identities. While it is surely an important tenet of any election system that there be assurance of "one RL person/one vote", enforcing this by threatening to compromise the privacy of a resident's vote is just as unacceptable now as it was then.

And if, perchance, the " " was meant to suggest that somehow this was intended as a bit of humor, it is not humorous.

Sudane

Must be Eugene and myself. We were voting, I think, literaly within minutes of each other.

hehe I'll vouch for that. I have met Daniel in RL and he's certainly not Sudane (based on familiarity with SL, amongst other things).

I've spoken with Daniel a few times on the phone. So I'll vouch for his seperate identity from Sudane as well.

Do we really want this thread poisoned by the intolerance and rage that was experienced in last-election's discussion thread? Of course it was humor. I know about Daniel and Digi. We went through that last election.

Please do not let this thread devolve like last year. As I recall that thread ended with you comparing me to Hitler and demanding that the Constitution be scrapped.

In fact, I think this thread is far enough off topic that I think I'll lock it and start a new election status thread.

~Ulrika~

A search of the forum on "Hitler" turns up no mentions save by you, Ulrika.

A further search on "Sudane Erato" and "constitution" contains nothing I can reasonably construe as "demanding the Constitution be scrapped".

I call shennanigans.

I wish. You were actually there for that thread.

The thread of which I'm speaking is one that is to this day quite difficult for me to read. It's the Election Results - August 2005 thread. I highly recommend that all citizens read through that thread to see the uglier side of self rule. It's the sole reason why I added a Voting Rules and Privacy and Validation section to the beginning of the election web page.

I was actually mistaken on the Hitler reference. I had forgotten that it was actually a dual reference to McCarthy and "Animal Farm".

The call to toss out the existing governmental and voting system in violation of the Constitution is also in that thread. Below there is the argument for allowing folks to have many alts, each with the right to vote: Here is a reiteration of the above statement along with the first part of a proposed new system of voting.
To this day I am still haunted by the hostility in that thread, specifically that post. I didn't know Sudane well at the time and was shocked that someone would give me a McCarthy-Animal-Farm-toss-out-the-constitution-and-let-alts-vote whammy. It has only been topped by that one time someone forwarded a private email I sent them about a third party to that third party without my permission. That made for months of pain that only recently have subsided.

To prevent the abuse of the voting proctor, I made a decision before this election to lock all threads that started to get out of hand. Hey, now that I'm not alone as a member of the RA, we could discuss how to handle similar situations as encountered in that thread.

~Ulrika~