English Chess Forum

This is beyond farcical.

For the record:

http://www.englishchess.org.uk/internat ... -election/

"International Director election

At the AGM on Saturday, the result of the election for International Director was announced as David Openshaw 141 Malcolm Pein 139. One of the tellers subsequently expressed concern, given the closeness of this election, at the fact that there had been insufficient time on the day of the meeting for a second count to be held to verify that these figures were correct if the results were to be announced before 18.30, and suggested that the votes should be recounted for the avoidance of doubt.

The Company Secretary, to whom the voting cards were passed at the conclusion of the meeting, has subsequently performed a recount, and this has been verified by an individual completely independent of the ECF. The revised count, which has been accepted by both candidates for the position as representing the correct outcome of the ballot, is:

David Openshaw 142

Malcolm Pein 164

Abstentions 3

(Of the total 324 votes indicated by the voting register, 15 related to Council members who were not represented at the meeting in person or by proxy).

Malcolm Pein is therefore the elected International Director for 2015/16.

The Board apologises to Council members for the incorrect initial announcement, and will be discussing at its meeting on Friday the lessons to be learned from the AGM. The rechecked votes cast in the other elections will be published in a separate post later today.



John Philpott
ECF Company Secretary"

Yes, bit of a difference there!

I don't really see how the initial count could have been so far wide of the mark.

I hope all of the election results have been double- checked. This is embarrassing.

Not strictly needed, as both candidates have accepted the result, but "this has been verified by an individual completely independent of the ECF". For this to have meaning, is it not necessary to name that person and have them *publicly* verify this?

Not sure about the beyond bit - looks very fitting material for a farce really

The number of votes being that far out does seem very strange. Do they use cards with numerical votes written on or something? Lose one or two of those in a pile somewhere and I could see it. Not if its one thing, one vote.

I'm kind of keen to know where 25 votes suddenly appeared from for Malcolm - or, if you prefer, where they'd got to previously.

Also, I'd like to be reassured that this is all perfectly constitutional.

Can one therefore be FIDE Delegate and International Director at the same time?

MartinCarpenter wrote: The number of votes being that far out does seem very strange.

With single individuals holding potential votes into double figures, not really. You just have to lose or miscount the allocation of votes on a single sheet or two. Those there will know how it was done. Would it have been one ballot paper per person, the total number of votes held by that person with the voting split to be filled in?

I suspect just misplaced/miscounted ballot papers. The ECF AGM I attended before in 2011 was mostly show of hands with some card voting. This time, it was different, with all the voting done on a sheet of A4 paper at the end after all the election addresses and then the tellers gathered the sheets of paper in and went off to count them. Might I suggest John Philpott upload a copy to the ECF website of the sheet of paper used (the blank template) so people can see what was used for voting? I did consider photographing my sheet of paper to show the organisation I represented how I had voted, but strange memories of it being illegal to do that in a general election stayed my hand (yeah, I know, strange).

Andrew Martin wrote:Can one therefore be FIDE Delegate and International Director at the same time?

FIDE Delegate can attend the Board meetings, is elected by the AGM alongside the Directors, but isn't a Director. Thus a Director can also be FIDE Delegate.

You may recall Gerry Walsh as both President and FIDE Delegate when the ECF was first established, so the rule may have been custom written for him. It was probably to Nigel's benefit that he had the authority of being directly elected when Andrew Paulson as President wanted him dismissed.

That voting system does sound really rather disaster prone. Even maybe from something as simple as people forgetting precisely how many votes they were responsible for.

Maybe we need to put new tellers in that is younger

i don't mind being a teller

Christopher Kreuzer wrote: but strange memories of it being illegal to do that in a general election stayed my hand (yeah, I know, strange).

You might also have recalled the FIDE Elections of 2006, where it was alleged some Delegates photographed how they voted, almost as if they needed it in support of an expenses claim. I believe FIDE now have a rule banning mobile phones and presumably cameras from the voting booth.

No, the A4 piece of paper had on it the representative and the number of votes they have. I would hope the tellers would check that someone didn't write "2" instead of "1" if they had one vote (for example). I wrote "1" and also wrote "0" in the bits that maybe should have been left blank. Someone with 2 votes could have written "1" and "1" or "2" and "0". Those with multiple votes split across the the three NED candidates would have been easy to get wrong.