Section 10 - GNSO Structure

The following quote from the text regarding the recent NCSG elections is, in my view inflammatory.  I regard it as inaccurate, and I would request that Westlake Associates change it prior to releasing the draft for comments:

It was widely commented by survey respondents and interviewees that the NCSG has issues that inhibit its effectiveness.  Essentially the NCUC, dominated by small or single person groups, is always likely to have the numbers to out-vote NPOC, which represents often larger but fewer NPOs. All four NCSG members recently elected to the GNSO Council have come from the NCUC because it has a far greater number of members than the NPOC, and voting is ‘first past the post’, rather than a form of proportional representation.

Since I am one of the four elected new NCSG members, I may be taking this paragraph rather personally, but I think Westlake should refer readers to the rules on voting procedure rather than citing a comment as gospel.  The tacit assumption appears to be that each constituency only votes for its own members, which I know is not the case.  Anyone can examine the voting numbers and see this.  NPOC only ran one candidate in this election.  Given the geographical distribution of seats (no more than two seats from each region, to the extent possible, and one North American seat is occupied for another year) and the fact that the only NPOC candidate was from North America, as I am, it meant that I was competing with their only candidate.  Since all other candidates were assured of a seat because no one ran against them, it might have been prudent for NPOC to have encouraged their folks from other regions to run as well.  In any case, I think it is inappropriate to state as fact either that NCUC can always outvote NPOC, or that the weighted voting does not actually work in favour of NPOC  (see below).  The bottom line remains, members have to volunteer to run, and members have to remember to vote.  Hopefully, they will vote for the person they feel will represent them best and work hard for the issues they care about, not just by constituency block.  I believe the NCSG voting system does a pretty good job of promoting that outcome at the moment, and would be interested to see facts about how some other system could produce a better outcome.