ICANN began to accept registrations for its new "At-Large Membership" on February 25, 2000 - about eight months before the actual election and five months before the direct election system were approved in Yokohama. Registration was handled in-house by ICANN, and extended from February through July 31, 2000.
Demand for registration services proved to be extremely high, particularly near the end of the registration period. Registrations peaked on June 25, with 24,310 registrations in twenty-four hours. In total, ICANN received 176,837 registrations - far more than had been expected.
As is discussed below, ICANN encountered significant technical problems during the registration phase, stemming back to early expectations about the Internet communityšs interest in an ICANN election. For that reason, the 176,837 registrations successfully processed are only a subset of the registration attempts of Internet users. While anecdotal accounts of denied registration are many, quantitative evidence on the subject is scarce, and it is not possible to say just how many Internet users may have been denied the opportunity to register due to server failure.
Registration was the first step towards voting. Through a second step, Activation, ICANN attempted to authenticate voters by mailing (by surface mail) each registered voter a password and PIN number, which the voter would then use to "activate" his or her membership on the ICANN Web site, members.icann.org.
The activation process encountered difficulties as well. As is discussed below, many voters found the postal return system unintuitive and unreliable. Some were unaware of the need to activate onešs membership at all, or of the existence of an activation deadline. These and other circumstances contributed to a low rate of membership activation.
Postal return difficulties and other problems eliminated 33,043 records from the ICANN database.
The chart above shows some of the shortcomings of the activation system. Besides the registrations for which the letters containing activation information were returned to ICANN (10,334, or about 6% of the total registrations), many more letters may have gone undelivered, particularly in countries using non-Roman alphabets. Counting, or even estimating, the number of such letters lost in the postal system is impossible.
The activation phase began while the registration phase was still underway; voters began activating their memberships as early as May 22. Activation ended on September 8, about three weeks before the start of voting.
September 8 was also the date on which the ballot for the October election was finalized. The ICANN ballot had two types of candidates, Board-nominated candidates, selected by a Nominating Committee established by the Board, and member-nominated candidates, chosen by voters themselves. Any member of the At-Large Membership could post his or her name on members.icann.org and solicit endorsements from voters. Election rules stated that would-be candidates had to collect endorsements from at least two percent of their regional electorate in order to be added to the ballot [ 12 ]; beyond that, top vote-getters would be added, to a maximum ballot size of seven candidates (both Board- and member-nominated) per region. Results of the member-nomination process are discussed below, but every region had at least one member-nominated candidate on its ballot.
After the ballot was finalized, a three-week campaign period began. ICANN supported the campaign by providing each candidate with Web space at members.icann.org, as well as a "Question and Answer" forum where members could submit questions for public response by candidates. These forums were fairly well populated; indeed, many of the candidates interviewed complained only about the volume of questions that they produced.
Some candidates did engage in campaigning beyond members.icann.org. Their activities are described in the regional studies below.
Actual voting began on October 1 and lasted for ten days. Unlike earlier phases of the election, ICANN contracted out the voting phase of the election to election.com, an online voting vendor located in the U.S. Voters entered their ID numbers, passwords, and PINs, then ranked the candidates in their region in order of preference. As in earlier phases of the election, some technical problems were seen: in ten days of voting, the servers were completely offline twice. The first instance was relatively early in the election period, lasting about an hour, and the second was at the very end of voting, lasting approximately forty minutes. ICANN and election.com extended voting for about thirty minutes beyond the stated deadline, then closed the polls.
election.com tallied the votes, and results were announced the next day. In four of the five regions, one candidate had a clear majority of votes; in North America, several automatic runoffs were held to determine the victor.
| 2.1.1. Limitations Faced by the ICANN Election | 2.1.3. Decisions Regarding Election Rules |
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