I believe that years of Jeff stating the voting rules at each meeting would be sufficient to correct those people who had the incorrect interpretation of the voting rules. When it was asked in Japan why we even have an abstain vote, Brian couldn't even give a logical explanation. He said something about it providing further feedback to those bringing the proposal, but that only makes sense for straw votes. You can try to convince me that some people could theoretically have been confused by how votes are counted because they have not been active in the Forum, but you will be hard pressed to convince me that the people pushing for abstain=no in Japan didn't know better. Dave From: Dave Goodell <[email protected]> To: Main MPI Forum mailing list <[email protected]> Date: 06/14/2012 11:27 AM Subject: Re: [Mpi-forum] Voting in July (and beyond) Sent by: [email protected] On Jun 14, 2012, at 10:53 AM CDT, David Solt wrote:

...

At the Japan meeting we took consensus from the room because there was no clear ruling on this known to *anyone* in the room.

I disagree. I felt there was a clear ruling on this and stated that at the Japan meeting.

Perhaps my "anyone" statement was slightly too strong. Nonetheless, I don't recall many (any?) others with a similar level of conviction.

I don't know how people can be so out of touch with what goes on at the meetings to not know how we have been voting for years.

The way that this happens is that both interpretations of the rules have always yielded the same result in the past. Only at the Japan meeting did we encounter a set of votes that would result in different outcomes under each interpretation. As Jeff has repeatedly pointed out, the voting rules web page is ambiguous, and reading it tends to just confirm the reader's view, regardless of which view that is. Years of voting in which the results match up with someone's interpretation (true for both interpretations) further reinforces a particular viewpoint. -Dave _______________________________________________ mpi-forum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.mpi-forum.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/mpi-forum