Statement AGAINST by Bakari W.
Hi all, I’m Bakari, a member of the chapter’s Steering Committee, chair of the Electoral Working Group, and one of the authors of the original poll resolution that this amendment applies to. I urge you to vote NO on this Amendment.
The most fundamental flaw with the amendment is that it doesn’t say what specific platform or service the poll would be hosted on, it only says that it won’t be Opavote or Google Forms. It says the poll will be disseminated via Weekly Update, but the Update itself has no direct polling functionality. I’ve asked the amendment’s sponsors if they have any specific alternative plan for conducting the poll, but none of them have given me one. If the amendment’s authors feel strongly against using Opavote for a poll and are willing to spend their time and everyone else’s on an amendment to change this procedure, why doesn’t the amendment actually include an alternative procedure?
Some of the sponsors of this amendment have called the act of conducting straw polls dilatory, or a waste of time. It’s valid for them to feel that way about the base resolution, even if I as an author of the base resolution obviously disagree. I think a poll’s a good way to get feedback on what people think about voting methods, which is important considering the chapter was split down the middle about STV vs. Approval a few months ago for Steering elections. I think a poll can (and in some ways already has) complement or spark in-depth discussions about voting methods either one-on-one or at events, and I don’t understand the argument I’ve heard that a poll stops person to person communication from happening.
But if the amendment was written out of disagreement on whether it’s good to collect feedback through a poll at all, then this amendment doesn’t address that disagreement. People could have just made the argument that polls were a waste of time and tried to convince people to vote down the base resolution. But instead this amendment was introduced, one that doesn’t actually propose an alternative. If they can’t tell me in detail what their plan is, then they shouldn’t have brought this amendment, and it definitely shouldn’t be passed.
Many of the amendment’s whereas clauses are irrelevant or, charitably, misleading. Like the assertion that using any method other than STV risks triggering an investigation from National DSA. First, that has nothing to do with the content of the amendment, the amendment still includes the non-STV methods. If someone felt that point needed to be made then it could have been made in a member statement against the base resolution. Second, several other chapters commonly use non-STV Hare methods for their delegate and Steering elections, like NYC-DSA with the Borda method or Atlanta with STV+Approval. The investigation, which ruled there wasn’t wrongdoing, was caused by the fact that the approval voting method that the chapter voted to adopt led to an election result that surprised and upset some members (the slate with the majority of chapter support winning almost all the seats). The feedback and debate about voting methods (debate that I’m sure is happening elsewhere in these member statements) that a poll would generate lessens the chance of a voting method having unforeseen implications and causing anyone to be upset with the results.
But that’s minor compared to the glaring fact that the amendment doesn’t actually have a proposed alternative, and the amendment’s authors don’t yet know how they or Steering (because it doesn’t specify who’s responsible) would administer the poll if this amendment were to pass. Please vote NO on this amendment.