Within the rules that the ICANN community established for the 2000 At-Large Election, it was a qualified success. The Membership selected five competent Directors to the Board, all of whom bring new perspectives and expertise that will benefit the corporation and the community over time. But in drafting future models for public participation, we must keep the shortcomings of the 2000 election in mind:
Technologies for online voting, particularly for voting on a global scale, are still nascent. As yet, the cost of carrying out even basic tasks like voter verification-a regular practice in the offline world-is high, and the technology is problematic. While in the future the world may develop infrastructure that would help solve this problem, it does not yet exist. Therefore, for the foreseeable future, though online elections will enjoy many benefits from the Internet's unique nature, they will also suffer some substantial costs.
The absence of community consensus on precisely what the 2000 election was supposed to achieve, and how it would achieve it, complicated even basic tasks of implementation. The lack was largely the result of strong, divergent pressures on the Board that separately raised a broad range of tough questions-yet collectively emphasized the overarching importance of quick action. Yet when attempts to push consensus forward failed in Cairo and Yokohama, the Board was forced to made quick, sharp changes in the direction of the election fairly late in the game. The Election and Nominating Committees operated with vague and overbroad missions, and outreach was generally unsuccessful.
While they may have a role to play in future elections, the processes used by both the Nominating Committee and the Election Committee in 2000 raised questions about the loci of control for the election. While the Election Committee's rules were ultimately positive ones, the Nominating Committee's conduct raised questions not only about the utility of the Board-nominated ballot, but of the control wielded by the Committee over the member-nominated ballot. Again, better-defined goals and rules for both committees might have assisted in this.
Early drafts of the Election Committee's election rules were criticized for their treatment of the member-nomination process. And while, as mentioned above, even the final rules fell short of providing the community with a unified concept of the 2000 election's priorities, they were much improved and worked well within their limitations. Every ballot included at least one member-nominated candidate, and member-nominated candidates were elected in two regions. Moreover, no candidates that demonstrated the threshold two percent regional support were denied access to the ballot. The five-region system, despite concerns about its resolution, performed well and resulted in a manageable election. And while the preferential voting system was complicated and unfamiliar to many, it maintains a capacity for basic fairness and was a generally positive part of the 2000 election.
ICANN's main outreach effort, the MITF, was not as effective as had been anticipated, opening the door to a major role for third parties in voter outreach and education. While the effects of this varied regionally, ICANN ceded a significant amount of authority to establish the tone of the 2000 election to outside groups.
The ICANN Board severely underestimated community interest in the 2000 election, but more troubling was its installation of voting/registration systems that could not be easily scaled up to handle unexpected demand. Although registration servers first went online in February 2000, and were designed to handle relatively limited loads, the fact that they were not designed with flexibility for future upgrades was a major oversight, and an obvious lesson for the future.
Critical questions about the election in several key areas could not be answered, either because of the inaccessibility of key information or because that information had not been collected in the first place. For example, it has not been possible to estimate the level of fraud that might have occurred in this election, nor to determine whether voters were adequately authenticated by ICANN's registration and election systems, nor to ascertain whether At-Large Directors might have been "captured" by determined interest groups. Other important data, such as voter turnout, was available only in aggregate form, and could not be meaningfully deconstructed along national, demographic, or ethnic lines. Whether the data scarcity can be properly attributed to reticence on ICANN's part or to technical shortcomings of the election system is unclear. But considering the experimental nature of the 2000 election, ICANN's failure to make advance provision for thorough analysis of the election data is disappointing.
| 2.1.5 Decisions Regarding Technical Provisions | 2.2.1 Africa |
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