Annual business meeting proxies are how we do business. This year, Proposal A was on the table to amend the Toastmasters club constitution, but only 74% of clubs were represented. One district appears to have gotten every single proxy collected, D70 (southeastern Australia), 100%, even a new club that chartered Aug. 14 (Griffith Toastmasters), very impressive!
This was closely followed by another Australian district, D69 (eastern Australia), at 97% (missed 5 clubs) and my home district, D30 (Chicagoland), at 96% (missed 9 clubs).
Districts with (lots of) room to improve include D34 (Mexico) with just 37% of clubs represented, D52 (southern California) at 39%, and D82 (Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka in India) at 49%.
The top quarter of districts beat 86% representation, the top half beat 75%, and the top 3/4 beat 66%.
While there are many things more important for Toastmasters districts to devote scarce resources to (no, not speech contests, I mean helping struggling clubs and building new clubs), this is the sort of thing that shouldn’t be that hard to do. A district proxy chair with a committee to call clubs and round up proxies makes an excellent High Performance Leadership (HPL) project!
Full details in the Excel spreadsheet here: Proxies2013
I would like to know who the spoiled ballots were from. We figured it had to be one person, who left at the break. Those ballots could have made the difference in several of the elections.
Emma, there’s no way to know, as the voting is secret, including spoiled ballots. The computer tabulation system keeps that all safe.
The difference between the winner and the loser in each race was never less than the number of invalid votes, except in the Region 7 second vote, between Chris Rio and Sharon Anita Hill; the difference was 401 votes, the number of invalid votes was 426.
It would’ve been necessary for nearly all the invalid votes, 94% of them, to be case for the losing candidate, for it to make a difference there. Not very likely.
One more detail — the invalid votes were NOT from someone who then abstained or left after the break. Here’s the total number of votes each time:
Total ballots issued: 21176
2VP: 20797 (379 abstain)
R1: 20998, 20778 (178 and 398 abstain)
R3: 21021 (155 abstain)
R5: 20773 (403 abstain)
R7: 20735, 20923 (441 and 253 abstain)
break
R9: 20846 (330 abstain)
R11: 20706 (470 abstain)
R13: 20889 (287 abstain)
Prop A: 20606 (570 abstain)
Note that the number abstaining didn’t go up by a large number until the end. The invalid votes were 318 three times, or higher, until the break, then it dropped to 204 votes, and then 12-18 votes.
I am aware that they have a class explaining how to use those clickers or whatever they are called for the voting proxy. When the gentleman realized that it was an ongoing problem at the business meeting…he should have gone over the procedure again and offered assistance for those who didn’t understand how to use it.
Carol, yes, Roberta Perry and I were leading the training class on how to use the keypad, immediately after they got them at credentials. Despite their being as easy to use as a dumb (calls only) cell phone, some people still had troubles, e.g., trying to spell out the word “cake” in our example voting.
I would agree that it would have been helpful for President John Lau to have taken 5 minutes to review how to vote, but asking people to get assistance if they didn’t know how to use it probably would not have worked, as they *thought* they knew how to use it.
We need different voting devices — a “pad” where you enter votes for all the candidates in one race at once would make it possible to prevent overvoting, spoiled ballots. Those would likely cost a fair bit more than the simple keypads we’re renting today.
Mike, Would it have been possible after every round of voting, listing the serial Nos of the Voting devices that created the invalid votes. That way, you could check if it was your unit. My strong belief is that the people not doing it correctly were not aware that they were doing so.
I don’t know the system involved, but I could see how that might raise questions about the secrecy of the vote. If we could see that unit 123 had mis-voted, might we also be able to see how unit 123 voted? Even if we could not, it might raise an appearance of possibly knowing how people voted, and the appearance is just as bad as the actual ability.
Apparently they did figure it out for the last few votes, though.
Votes are 100% traceable. In order for a proxy to be validated with a keypad, the proxy and club number is tied to the specific keypad. The keypad is only valid if it has a proxy tied to it. This keeps anyone from bringing in rougue keypads.
WHQ has all the data on who voted for what. How do you think they know who “didn’t” turn back in their keypad…and then go hit them up for it later. How do you think you get the numbers on invalid votes.
How did you get the number of votes per district that were abstained? Your an IT guy right? Think about it. If WHQ can provide details on votes, they certainly have access to the backend data. After all, who is handing out and verifying devices? Last year WHQ was very involved in credentials.
WHQ does NOT have the data on who voted, as the keypads are administered by a vendor — third party, arms length, with no interest in the results.
Who gets which keypad is recorded by TI — but the actual voting goes to a machine that the vendor operates.