[NA-Discuss] Building consensus on dealing with the election tie

[Evan Leibovitch]

Hello all,

I would like to suggest conducting a poll of NARALO members on the best way
to deal with the tie for Secretariat resulting from the recently-held vote.
While we need to revise our regulations regarding tie-breaking, we have an
immediate need to resolve the current situation before the next ICANN
meeting.

Based on discussions I have heard to date, there are three paths to
resolving this that have received some interest:

   1. Random tie-break
   The votes for ALSs and unaffiliated members is re-held, and the rules
   are modified. If another tie results, the tie is broken by a random method,
   supervised by at least two non-candidate members and/or At-Large staff.

   2. Tie-break by NA-Region ALAC members
   The votes for ALSs and unaffiliated members is re-held and he rules are
   modified. If another tie results, the tie is broken by a consensus achieved
   in private by the three ALAC members for North America (Alan, Eduardo and
   myself). Since there are three of us, no deadlock is allowed there

   3. Shared Secretariat
   No new election is held, and NARALO declares both Darlene and Glenn as
   co-Secretariats. While there is no precedent for this in NARALO, there is
   elsewhere in ICANN At-Large (both co-Chair and co-Secretariats have been
   done in other regions). The two would alternate travel to ICANN meetings
   (though both would naturally be at the Summit in London). In the case that
   any of the North American At-Large leadership cannot attend a meeting
   (Chair, travel-designated secretariat or ALAC member), the "non-travelling"
   secretariat member would automatically be designated to take that travel
   allocation. The rules may still be modified in case of future ties, but
   such action is not required immediately.

So I am proposing that, in advance of the next NARALO call, we could do an
informal poll of members (by Bigpulse or Doodle) to gain a sense of
preferences between these options that may help guide a regional consensus
on the August call.

Is this a workable plan? Are the options above a valid representation of
the ones discussed? (There are some other tie-break methods I have
eliminated because of lack of support to date).

I admit that when I started thinking about the tie I had not given any
thought to the shared secretariat idea, but it has grown on me since. There
is a significant amount of work to do, and it would be IMO a shame to force
an all-or-nothing tiebreak on two people with both popular support and an
eagerness to do the job.

- Evan