I'll make a much stronger statement. I am not concerned over hair-splitting of defining "simple majority". I am very concerned that we are engaging in hair splitting over the definition in order to decide when to include things that do NOT have a clear consensus (and abstains count against that because "don't care" and "don't know" are not NOT pro votes). I'll repeat what I said earlier: if a ticket does not have a clear consensus, the honorable thing is for the proposers to retract it (perhaps to a later date when they have established consensus). In the absebce of that, other voters SHOULD vote "NO" at the second vote. We are talking about decisions with long and costly implications. 8 votes out of approximately 25 steady participants is not enough of a basis on which to make them. I note that LLNL voted in favor of at least one ticket that lost because of the rules. We would not have voted in favor in July without a significant change in the overall vote. Overall, I think the Japan rules interpretation resulted in the right results, whether or not they were consistent with prior votes. On Fri, 15 Jun 2012, Jim Dinan wrote:

On 6/15/12 8:05 AM, Jeff Squyres wrote:

...

It's fairly obvious that people are refraining from commenting on the mailing list.

As one of those silent folks, IMHO, I'm not too worried about this since the Forum strives for consensus anyway. I can find reasons to favor either set of voting rules and can read both interpretations from the current written rules. I'm not too concerned about which one we choose, so long as we make a clear choice, update the rules, and continue to strive for consensus.

~Jim. _______________________________________________ mpi-forum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.mpi-forum.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/mpi-forum