English Chess Forum

Paul Cooksey wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 18, 2021 8:51 pm

Playing devils advocate, I think the traditionalist view is that volunteers will be incentivised by getting influence at Council by virtue of organising chess. That does seem to be true in some cases.

Really? Certainly not in mine.

I agree with Nick. I've not come across any local volunteer motivated by collecting votes to use at ECF meetings. The votes are at most a by-product of their activity, and most would rather be helping at an event than at Council.

NickFaulks wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 18, 2021 8:31 pm

Ian Thompson wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 18, 2021 8:25 pm

1. The option of voting for 'None of the Above' or 'Only One of the Above' when electing Direct Member Reps.

How would that work? At present you have the option of giving each candidate 1 vote ( up to two of them ) or 0 votes. Are you adding the option of -1?

If four candidates put their names forward, then the voters get to choose two out of:

• Candidate A
• Candidate B
• Candidate C
• Candidate D
• Position One Vacant
• Position Two Vacant

with a requirement that Position Two Vacant can only be voted for if Position One Vacant is also voted for.

The two choices with the greatest number of votes win. If fewer than two candidates get more votes than the Vacant Positions, one or both positions will be unfilled.

I don't think -1 would work. If you wanted A and B, then there'd be an incentive to give -1 to C and D to effectively give A and B two votes each.

Ian Thompson wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 18, 2021 9:30 pm

If four candidates put their names forward, then the voters get to choose two out of:

• Candidate A
• Candidate B
• Candidate C
• Candidate D
• Position One Vacant
• Position Two Vacant

with a requirement that Position Two Vacant can only be voted for if Position One Vacant is also voted for.

That looks well worked out, better than my instant reaction.

Here's a potential solution to that one: you get to vote For or Against each candidate in turn, and then sort the candidates by (For-Against). Only those for which that is a positive number can win; if there are more than the number of positions, the highest-placed ones win.

John Swain wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 18, 2021 8:43 pm

There are, however, complications. Suppose, to use Drag's example, the Nottinghamshire rep has 200 votes to cast, canvasses opinions and 100 Notts folk bother to reply; the votes are 52-48 in favour of proposal A. Should the rep cast votes in proportion 104-96 in favour, or 200-0 in favour?

That situation already exists in the current system. People asked whether John Reyes would split his vote in light of the likelihood of Tim Wall not doing so.
Neither system eliminates that problem.

The advantage of my proposal is that if a member felt or knew the rep would be casting some or all of the votes for candidate A and the member preferred candidate B the member could choose a different rep.

Paul raises a good point about the organisers, and there was some merit in saying that those who organise more should get more votes when we still had game fee as they were raising more money for the ECF.

The board decided to go for a membership system instead of game fee so the voting rights should now also reflect membership numbers rather than games played.

By way of reply to Angus, the Council paper in October 2017 indicates that the motive for retaining the secret ballot for elections was to avoid members of Council feeling that there might be undue influence on them to vote in a particular way.

Robert Stern wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 19, 2021 3:23 pm

By way of reply to Angus, the Council paper in October 2017 indicates that the motive for retaining the secret ballot for elections was to avoid members of Council feeling that there might be undue influence on them to vote in a particular way.

Thanks Robert, that's helpful. And it was interesting reading back and seeing what changes were made four years ago.

Dragoljub Sudar wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 18, 2021 7:06 pm

I think a far better system would be to require every member, when paying their ECF membership fee, to select which organisation should represent them. I could then select Nottinghamshire, or the MCCU, or the 4NCL, or Tim Wall, or John Reyes, or any of those entitled to vote (i.e. not restricted by geography). Everyone would be able to change their choice at any time.

I think this is a simple system, far more representative than the current system, and as near to OMOV without being OMOV.

Why not having OMOV then?

I believe that members of any organisation should be both responsible for electing directors/managers of the organisation and accountable for funding the organisation.

With the current ECF structure, the "members" responsible for electing directors/managers are the organisations forming the council, while the "members" accountable for most of the funding are individual members.

If OMOV has been considered and discarded as an option, then my recommendation would be to scrap individual membership; council and directors/managers remain the same but the organisations voting at the ECF council should be also responsible for founding the ECF through "organisation membership fees". In turn they would likely charge their individual customers (players). This way the line of accountability would be a lot cleaner. Also, whichever organisation brings more funding to the ECF would have more weight in council.

Paolo Casaschi wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 19, 2021 4:22 pm

If OMOV has been considered and discarded as an option, then my recommendation would be to scrap individual membership; council and directors/managers remain the same but the organisations voting at the ECF council should be also responsible for founding the ECF thought "organisation membership fees". In turn they would likely charge their individual customers (players). This way the line of accountability would be a lot cleaner. Also, whichever organisation brings more funding to the ECF would have more weight in council.

That's the way it used to be from around 1994 to the early 2010s.

Some Congress organisers along with NCCU people and some running the 4NCL hated the system of them having to fund the BCF/ECF and did their best to undermine it, eventually succeeding. They never gave up their voting rights though.

[edit]

One of the measures taken to undermine the previous Game Fee system was an acceptance of the assertion that to be FIDE rated it was necessary to be a "member". This arguably was false but was not opposed by those organisations most affected such as internationally rated Congresses and the 4NCL. FIDE were really only looking to establish the Federation of every rated player and not mandating the worldwide existence of compulsory schemes of membership. It got even worse when the ECF was set up and "member" was interpreted to mean a member as guarantor in the Companies Act sense. There followed a major and unnecessary row with the NCCU over "white forms". The NCCU had successfully conned Northern players into paying more to the ECF. What they did was tell Northern players that if they paid an individual per year fee of £ 10, that the Northern organisations would not have to pay membership fees to the BCF/ECF. What they didn't point out was that the amount collected from individuals would exceed the amount collected from organisations.

[/edit]

Firstly can I refer those posting on this thread to https://www.englishchess.org.uk/wp-cont ... Reform.pdf which is the consultation document Mike Truran and Robert Stern put before the 2017 Finance Council. As I've noted before Council perhaps inevitably rejected it at the time but if there are sufficient requisitionists to put it on the 2022 Finance Council agenda it can easily be revisited and passed.

Pending reform of Council; in my view the following actions need to be taken ASAP.

a) Board members should be barred from serving as direct members representatives with immediate effect; due to the obvious conflict of interest.
b) Direct members should be balloted on officer elections and motions via an auditable process and the role of direct member representatives should be to ensure these votes are cast accordingly (you could remove the existing representative structure and simply give responsibility for casting members votes to the Chairman of Council.
c) The bye-laws regarding the responsibilities of directors should be rewritten with regard to the role of the President. Under Dominic Lawson the role has moved from an executive one to an ambassadorial one (which has worked better) but he should not be able to "gift" his board vote.

Andrew Zigmond wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 19, 2021 10:21 pm

Under Dominic Lawson the role has moved from an executive one to an ambassadorial one (which has worked better) but he should not be able to "gift" his board vote.

I believe that was always the way it was meant to work. Only Roger Edwards of previous ECF presidents approached the role in that manner. Otherwise you get conflicts. In the ECF era that started with Walsh v Regan.

Andrew Zigmond wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 19, 2021 10:21 pm

b) Direct members should be balloted on officer elections and motions via an auditable process and the role of direct member representatives should be to ensure these votes are cast accordingly (you could remove the existing representative structure and simply give responsibility for casting members votes to the Chairman of Council.

That sounds alarmingly like a potentially workable system of OMOV, But where would the majority of voting power lie?
How do other vaguely similar organisations handle the issue, the EBU for example?

A possible solution might be to give every member of the ECF a vote in addition to Council. Therefore the balance of power depends on two factors a) how many individual members actually exercise their right to vote and b) what the split in the direct members vote is (the Council vote could be irrelevant or it could tip the scales).

OMOV in any form throws up potential problems; the main ones being the result hinging on who is better at getting their vote out and also somebody who might be popular in the chess community but lacks the skillset to do the job, being elected. Both those problems exist within the current system as well.

Andrew Zigmond wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 19, 2021 10:21 pm

b) Direct members should be balloted on officer elections and motions via an auditable process and the role of direct member representatives should be to ensure these votes are cast accordingly (you could remove the existing representative structure and simply give responsibility for casting members votes to the Chairman of Council.

Direct Member Reps also have the right to put items on the agenda at meetings, so long as two of them agree to do so, so that right shouldn't be lost to Direct Members wishing to lobby their Reps to do so. Direct Members also need someone to speak on their behalf at meetings.

(If I've understood the Articles of Association correctly, Direct Members can't put items on meeting agendas themselves unless they signed the forms that were circulated years ago to become Individual Members and five of them agree to do so. How many of the 10,000 or so Direct Members are Individual Members of the ECF as defined in the Articles? I've never seen any figures for that.)