BIDA Election Thoughts

April 2nd, 2024
bida, contra, organizing
At this Sunday's dance BIDA will be holding its annual meeting, which means at the break there will paper ballots for voting on two things:

  • Board: Who will run the organization for the next year?
  • Bylaws: Three proposed changes to simplify elections.

Harris wrote up a blog post with a sample ballot and candidate statements. Possibly I should have expected this from our unprecedented recent attendance, but this is the most people we've ever had running, by a large margin.

I'm not making any endorsements for the election: I've enjoyed working with the people who are running for re-election, and I'd be happy working with any of the people running to join. I'm glad to see this level of enthusiasm for helping make this all-volunteer organization happen!

On the bylaw changes, I think all three would be good. I think the case for (C), switching to standard approval voting, is by far the strongest: there's no reason to limit how many people you can vote for. The cases for (A) and (B) are also pretty good: (A) avoids asking dancers to fill out ballots which don't do anything, which happened in 2022, and (B) handles a case where the board is functioning well, has more than seven people, and no one is interested in leaving or joining. Of these, (A) and (B) would be irrelevant this year (and I generally prefer them to stay irrelevant—interest in joining is good!) while (C) would help a lot (if there are a lot of people you want to vote for and a few people you'd like to vote against).

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