[Community-Discuss] [members-discuss] AFRINIC Board Representative to the NRO NC/ASO AC

[Owen DeLong]

> On Nov 1, 2016, at 12:16 , Jackson Muthili <jacksonmuthi at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 4:54 PM, Walubengo J <jwalu at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> @Muthili,
>> 
>> ..rejection?
>> 
>> I do not remember AfriNIC elections being held  to reject anyone. The vote
>> is always held to elect not reject candidates who have shown the willingness
>> to serve on volunteer basis.
> 
> A vote is held to elect. You may sugarcoat anyway you want but the one
> not elected got rejected. Or refused or ignored whatever word you
> please. And there usually are reasons why someone gets voted in, and
> why someone else doesn't. That is why there was a vote.

No Jackson, this simply isn’t true.

Getting more votes means you were favored by more people.

It doesn’t imply in any way that anyone voting was opposed to your holding the position.

Of course, it is likely in any case that some were opposed and some were in favor and others may have been neutral.

In the best of circumstances, you have two or more candidates all of whom are well liked by the majority of the community, but only one can be elected. Do you truly think this necessarily means that the other 2 were rejected, or did the electorate simply find the one who was elected slightly more appealing?

Consider the possibility of a three-candidate election with 376 voters. The candidate elected gets 126 votes. The other two each get 125.

Does this mean that one person can decide for the entire community that two people are “rejected” by the entire community? This is absurd.

Heck, even if we consider this logically without the one-vote differential, consider that for each of the candidates, by your logic, there were approximately twice as many people rejecting them as favoring them.

>> Not winning is not the same as being rejected.
> 
> Of course it is the same if there was a vote.

I think you are missing the point.

Not winning is passive. It does not imply animosity towards the losing party.

Rejection is active. It indicates actual active hostility towards the losing party.

There may be hostility among some in the community towards Fiona or there may not be. Obviously you have some level of dislike for her being appointed.

However, the election results only tell us that she did not win. That a plurality of the community expressed a preference for another candidate.

>> Last time I checked very
>> useful members of community were not elected in the recent past but continue
>> to engage positively.
> 
> Without a doubt.
> 
>> Alain A, Badru, Paulos  never made it back to the Board.  I did not know
>> that, that meant community had rejected them.
> 
> Of course it means members rejected them.

No, it means members did not select them. Not selecting something is not the same as rejecting it.

>> Maybe  we change our bylaws to
>> reflect this new reasoning?
> 
> If the community voted Fiona out of a role, this was obvious they did
> not want her in.

But the community did not vote Fiona out of a role. The community voted another candidate into the role which she was previously occupying.

That expresses that more of the community wanted the other candidate fulfilling that role. It does not necessarily imply that the community wanted Fiona removed from that role.

The only vote I am aware of anywhere that expresses rejection of an office holder is what is known as a “Recall Election”. To the best of my knowledge, Fiona was not subjected to any such vote.

> If board on the other hand have reinstated her to the same role that
> the community did not want her in, interpret it the way you wish but
> this is a sign of something not right on the board part. In the 50
> something countries on our continent, nobody else, other than a person
> voted out, could come in to serve the same role?

You start from a number of flawed assumptions and then build on that to state a flawed conclusion. The facts do not support either your incorrect assumptions about the meaning of the election in question, nor do they support your conclusion that the board has acted incorrectly.

Owen