Fellowship elections participation

[Daniel Pocock]

On 27/04/17 13:13, Joe Awni wrote:
> 
> Because the last two years elections have been anomalous!
>

You mean the process or the result is anomalous?

Elections are always run by humans (or by machines built by humans and
hacked by humans) and consequently any large enough election will have a
few mis-counted ballot papers.

Whether this impacts the result, however, is another question


> 
> As an idea to improve governance, why not include important decisions
> like this as a referendum in the election?
>

Talking and voting isn't everything - action is also important.  I'm
sure that if the British government ran a referendum on cutting taxes it
would get a lot more consensus than their Brexit referendum.  If you ran
a referendum to say cancer needs a cure people would vote for that too
but it may not have any impact on the disease itself.  I'm not saying
that there shouldn't be any votes, rather, there needs to be a balance
between voting and doing.

As another example, in Australia our federal government has an election
every 3 years.  In the US, the president is elected every 4 years.  In
the UK, elections are every 5 years.  The outcome in Australia is that
the people who are elected spend the first 3-6 months getting to know
the system and the last 12 months preparing for the next election, so
there is only a gap of about 18 months in the middle where they can do
"real" work like taking study tours in Europe and the US.

Regards,

Daniel