About the voting rules

[Adrian Custer <acuster nature berkeley edu>]

Hey all,

Thank you to the election committee for running the election. I'm just
now getting around to voting so I came across the rules. Here there are:

Your ballot will be considered invalid if one of these conditions
> has been violated:
> * there is no member e-mail address
> * the member e-mail address is not the e-mail address this ballot was
> sent to
> * there is no validation token
> * the validation token is not valid
> * there are too many candidates chosen (more than 11)
> * there is no candidate chosen
> * there is a duplicate vote for a candidate

The last two are problematic. I don't think either should invalidate a
ballot.

1) voting for no one actually has an important function, one very
different from not voting. There is no reason this should invalidate a
ballot. The ballot should be added to the total tally and no votes cast.

2) duplicate names should not prevent the ballot from working, they are
merely useless. These votes should simply be discarde, not the ballot
itself.

I'm sure the committee has thought about this and maybe decided the
extra effort (parsing, cross-checking or whatever) outweighed the
benefits of accepting these ballots. Still in a perfect foundation,
these rules would be different.

all the best,
adrian