The challenge may be doing this without creating privacy issues, ie, without giving TDs and affiliates access to someone’s current email address. (Same thing applies to updating mailing addresses.)
If the member chooses to give an affiliate/TD their mailing or email address, that’s a different matter, but your organization should probably have implemented some measure of privacy controls on that data.
The privacy question was raised previously & we’ve already put measures in place to protect privacy: we do not sell or give away member contact information. All communications go out through US Chess. Candidates prepare a message & request an email blast filtered for those they want to reach or have it printed & pay the US Chess mail provider to mail it, with only the mailing service having the addresses for 1 time use, not the candidates. Eliminating the voter registration requirement doesn’t alter the privacy landscape.
I see that I was not clear. By “no email,” I meant an option to not receive email messages rather than an option to not provide an email address. I don’t believe that Illinois prohibits members from opting-out of receiving email messages, including ballots. (We’d have a problem if it did, since we’ve allowed members to decline to receive email.) What matters is that they be advised of how to vote and offered an opportunity to vote.
A ‘no email’ policy would need some interpretation or delineation of exceptions, and IMHO the whole concept of automatic voting member status needs to be referred to corporate counsel.
As I recall, about 20 years ago there was a legal opinion regarding the Illinois not-for-profit requirements and voting member mailing addresses. I haven’t looked at the Illinois statutes lately, I don’t think they explicitly mentioned email addresses 10 or so years ago, or if there has been case law on that point.
That’s something counsel should be able to offer a researched opinion on.
And those changes also serve to significantly increase the cost of those who are trying to campaign - now you want to raise the cost even more.
They are advised of the process to vote and have an opportunity to vote when they register.
I think one of the issues with this is the email address is their username to login to the member dashboard and if you change the email, they possibly still have to use their older email address to login? It may take office assistance to actually change a username on an account to a new email address.
With hindsight, it may have been better to have say a US Chess ID as a username for folks as that should actually remain the same for someone throughout their entire US Chess life.
Many security people recommend that your login should not be something easily looked up, like your email address or membership ID.
And of course passwords should be both unique to each site and difficult to guess. (Security experts say over 95% of people fail on one or both of these recommendations.)
Many sites now have a lockout feature if you enter the wrong password too many times, which helps deal with brute force password attacks.
Probably time to split this topic up into at least two parts.
Not everyone is advised of the registration process when they join: many were initially registered as children; many were registered and are renewed by an organizer or TD who may not ask them to provide an email address or explain the importance of providing one.
The only rationale now offered for opposing granting every member easy access to the ballot is a smaller electorate helps candidates who want to send snail mail promos. That sounds of voter suppression, intentional disengagement from members, and a preference for low-information campaigning. To say “they can figure out how to get involved/vote if they want to” is to divide the membership into “us & them,” “insiders & outsiders.” Having more engaged & more involved members brings legitimacy to what leadership does; members who are engaged bring more ideas, promote the mission, and recruit more members. Forms of campaigning other than postcards can deliver far more information: email, social media, podcast interviews, videos, town halls, and forums can all result in a deeper discussion of qualifications, ideas, member services, the 501(c)(3) mission, and which combination of candidates will combine with continuing incumbents to produce the most effective board.
As to candidates who think postcards are the cat’s meow, they can choose to filter the voter list & send only to those they consider likely voters, be that those who have voted in prior elections, those who have higher ratings, those who play in more tournaments, or whatever criteria they like. Allen, you keep refusing to address this point.
On this point - the TD renewal process for a member doesn’t show if a member being renewed has an email address, much less if it’s correct. This is by design for privacy reasons but does make it much less likely for a TD to realize that an email needs to be updated or to do the updating.
Agreed, although as
I have some doubts as to how much things would change with a no-registration-required system.
This seems like a fairly obvious option, although it’s unclear to me how one filters for this; I know how to send an email blast to geographical regions only, but where are the options to send postcards to potential voters (or players), and to select by any of these criteria? Is that a “contact the office” thing?
Having more people getting ballots does not make them more engaged per se. When we were sending out 50,000 ballots we were getting back a few thousand at best. Why do you insist that this plan will get more member engaged, when they can get engaged now if they wish and most choose not to do so. Why do you keep refusing to address this point? Because it doe snot logically make sense.
And doing this is not going to solve the email issue. The unique email did not become an issue until the system changed. Then young children often don’t have one - or a parent will list their own as they don’t want a child receiving email. And if I as a TD am entering memberships I am not taking the time to hunt down an email address when I need to get a tournament rated.
Sending email through US Chess is not free. And sending more of it costs more. In the current campaign there were two different mailing from the group of 4. They did those because they work. There is a whole industry built around direct mail - and it survives because it yields results. But even then - US Chess charges more to send out more emails. Why do want to increase the costs for candidates to engage with voters - particularly when most of those you want to add have never cared about US Chess elections? It sure looks like increasing revenue for US Chess from candidates is one of the goals.
The voter registration is a great way to filter the list. After all 40% of those registered voted in this election so contacting the registered voters was 10% or less of the cost of contacting all adult members. That is one of the main reasons voter registration was done. The folks proposing this don’t know the history. They say it is all about the cost for US Chess to send out and count paper ballots - and it was not really about that at all.
If you’re saying that the registration was put in place deliberately to make it easier for a smaller number of people to make it on the executive board, that’s not really selling the idea.
Registration was put in place solely to cut cost by not printing and mailing a paper ballot to every eligible voter. The ADM cuts out registration now that we’re doing electronic balloting only and would not have the added cost of printing and sending ballots to every eligible voter.
That is not what I said at all. Not even sure how you get there. What I said was a consideration was the cost for candidates to reach voters when pretty clearly 90% pf eligible members did not care about the politics at all. A bunch just want to maintain a rating and play in rated tournaments. Others want the magazine. Others want to support US Chess activities or appreciate opportunities they had as a result of membership. It makes it easier to campaign by reducing the cost significantly
Sorry Mike that is not true at all. Ask Goichberg. It was one of the considerations, but not the only one.
Here’s another issue with automatic voter registration.
We have several hundred prison members, and nearly all of them will be over 15 (assuming we have a birthdate at all.)
However, very few will have an email address, because for the most part prisons don’t give prisoners access to email.
The technical issues that I have raised are ones that may be addressable, but it seems clear that the maker(s) of this motion didn’t realize the potential problems it would create.
How are prisoners an issue that is new or unique to auto-registration? Prisoners without email already can’t register & vote. Counsel advised that was not a reason not to move to all electronic voting, and it’s not an issue here either.
Illinois counsel has reviewed the ADM and says it complies with Illinois law. Whatever it is that you said you vaguely recall being discussed as a possible legal issue years ago, there is no legal problem created by the current automatic registration motion.
Allen is making good points about the various drawbacks of automatically opting members in to the voting pool, and I take those objections seriously. On balance, however, I think more democracy is generally worth the trouble.