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Unable to Vote in the Bitcoin Foundation Elections?

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Joel Dalais
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There has unfortunately been recent confusion with the Bitcoin Foundation Elections.

We attempted to highlight the new criteria in our first article covering the Foundation elections and at the end of each following candidate article, gently nudged people that they might want to read the initial election article.

That due to a recent change in the bylaws, members were required to “activate” their account for voting.

This new change came about due to the previous election rules requiring a certain percentage of the membership to vote for a candidate for that candidate to win. Because of this, technically, no candidate won the last election.

A candidate needed 52, or greater, votes to be able to win a seat. The votes that did come in placed Bobby Lee of BTC China in the lead, Brock Pierce in second, and Vinny Lingham of Gyft , as third.

The recent changes were stated in the Foundation blog of December 19th, 2014;

election1

You can follow this link  to get straight to the request on GitHub, which was submitted on November the 26th, 2014.

election2And was approved by the Foundation Board on December the 16th, 2014.

election3Note: bg002h is Brian Goss, Chair of the Election Committee, and pmlaw is Patrick Murck, Executive Director of the Bitcoin Foundation.

Dedicated emails went out on the 6th of February to notify members to confirm themselves to vote. And on the 10th of February a reminder was included in the Foundations “Bitcoin Foundation Bits & Bytes” newsletter/email.

However, it was not tweeted on their Twitter feed (@BTCFoundation)! Though with the numerous tweets on their page I would be surprised if anyone used that as a primary source while awaiting notification to confirm themselves to vote.

There are currently 364 voters confirmed, compared to 102 last year. It is likely that because voting has already started there will be no changes made.

However, the inability to vote seems not limited to members that wished to vote and are unable due to, not registering themselves. Some individuals have reported not receiving emails though they state they confirmed themselves in good time. For any reason, all members affected are being asked to post publicly on the Foundation forums.

Posting publicly in this manner allows for transparency, a public record, and for everyone to see the extent of the issue at hand. This will in turn allow the Foundation, via the Election Committee, to either possibly address the immediate situation (if the numbers are substantial) and to apply suitable fixes so this does not occur in the future.

You can find the appropriate Bitcoin Foundation forum thread here – Problem Voting? 

Disclaimer: The author is a Lifetime member of the Bitcoin Foundation registered himself and is able to vote.