Here are the results of the 2025 US Chess Executive Board Election:
Anand Dommalapati: 1323
John D Rockefeller V: 1318
Kevin Pryor: 1309
Daniel Serna: 1239
Alan Kantor: 873
Abstentions: 100
Congratulations to Anand, John, Kevin and Daniel who each will have a four-year term on the Executive Board! starting at the conclusion of this year’s Delegates Meeting.
There were 5089 registered voters and 40% voted. About 25 registered voters did not receive a ballot due to issues with their e-mail (e.g. mailbox full).
I think the all-time high is still in the 5000’s. That was a paper ballot election back when around 40,000 adult members were eligible to vote.
This does appear to be a high since we went to the registered voter approach, as less than 15% of those eligible to vote have registered to vote.
The online voting systems I’m aware of either use the email address as a primary key or provide a unique voter key to each voter. (That usually means sending them that key by postal mail, which sort of defeats online voting as a cost-saving option.)
FWIW, we still have over 8000 current members who share an email address with another current member, though not all of those are eligible to vote.
Please see ADM25-09 which gets rid of registration by redefining what a voting member is. Here is the critical piece of that ADM:
"A Voting Member is any member who:
• Is 16 years of age or older as of June 30 of the election year; and
• Has been a member for the 12-month period preceding June 1 of the election
year.
Voting members are automatically registered to vote. There is no registration fee to vote. "
I won’t comment on substance at this time as that’s largely a policy issue (though I may have comments at the workshops and during the Delegates Meeting.)
However, as written this is not implementable because a requirement for using the online voting is having a unique email address for each voting member in the membership system and we have thousands of potential voting members who do not meet that condition, either because their email address is not unique within the membership system or because there is no email address on file for that member. (Those who might be eligible but for whom there is no birthdate on file are a separate but much smaller group.)
Thus, we cannot automatically make that person a voting member, as there is no way that person can vote.
If we tell potentially eligible voting members “You are automatically registered as a voting member” but then can’t get them into the online voting system, someone could raise a legal challenge that an election was not valid because a large number of possible voters were disenfranchised.
As we found out some years ago, under Illinois law those eligible to vote in an election for directors cannot request to be withheld from lists of member information for candidates and others to contact them for election campaigning.
As I recall this was one of the factors that led to the voting member registration system, since that was an opt-in process.
That would probably also mean they cannot be excluded from an election-related email blast, either. That creates an inherent conflict between this Illinois law and the federal CAN-SPAM act, I suspect the Illinois law would prevail in a court action.
If we don’t already have them in place, we should probably have legal disclaimers stating that voting members are exempt from privacy measures for election-related issues due to the Illinois not-for-profit act.
Does this proposal mean all Life Members (age 16 and older) are automatically voting members regardless of any activity in US Chess in the previous year(s)?
If someone allows his membership to lapse for a few days or a couple of months, would that person be ineligible to vote the subsequent June?
I would say that motion would apply to active life memberships as well as any other current memberships (age 16 or older.). We have over 4000 life members (myself included) who haven’t played in a rated game in a decade or longer, including several active NTDs.
We set around 2900 life memberships to inactive status several years ago because they had no recent activity and we did not have a valid email or postal mail address for them. I think since then we’ve only had a handful of those members request to be reinstated.
I think the current procedure is that if the registered voting member is active (eg, non-lapsed) on the day the ballot instructions are sent out by email, they get that email. There is no requirement to have been an active (nonlapsed) member for any length of time other than ‘right now’, but they must currently be a registered voting member.
As a practical matter, if someone’s membership lapses and is renewed within a moderate grace period (around 60 days) we do not require that renewed member to re-register as a voting member.
Yes it would mean all life members regardless would be eligible - of course they need a current email address. That is one of the problems with this proposal.
There were about 1200 more votes cast in 2025 than in 2023. That is votes cast, not ballots submitted (each of which could have 0-4 votes on it. There were 100 ballots this year that were abstentions.) The move to all-electronic voting and the get out the vote effort appear to have combined to increase participation.
Life members are already eligible voters whether they are active as players, in governance, as directors or organizers, or in any other way. With registration being required, life members registration can never lapse, despite them neither voting nor participating im the organization in any way, whereas all other members have to re-register to vote if their membership lapses for a period of time.
Having a unique email address is a requirement for obtaining a website login, and having a website login is a requirement for registering to vote. A substantial effort has been underway to get members to add their unique email address.
One suggestion has been made to add a request on the renewal page to check & update the member’s email aa well as options for “no email” and “election emails only.”
We at Bay Area Chess run 200-300 tournaments a year. We have our own registration site where we work hard to keep our emails current.
Most of our players renew their membership through our website or directly with the Tournament Directors, rather than on their own. We used to be able to update their USCF email from the current email we have in our system to keep US Chess in sync and up to date. Help us help US Chess to get emails added and kept up to date.
tom