Originally Posted by Mentalist Traceur (Post 1277033)

Only fair? The two are rather different situations. If a person tries to jump in after nomination period closes (regardless of whether you're referring to me or not), then you could make an argument that they're abusing the system (my understanding is that the nominate/vote week gap is there so that everyone has time to contemplate the candidates, so you could argue the late-nominee is depriving the electorate of their ability to contemplate their nomination as well as they could those of the other candidates). If a candidate drops out, the voters are probably not going to have to change much, other than shift in the candidates that they liked less than the one that dropped out.

However, what 'fairness', exactly, does preventing someone from dropping out of a race, produce? It'll probably have a chilling effect on nominations, or acceptances thereof, because now god forbid your circumstances change and you can no longer run. But that will be minor.

The real problem, however, is that it's detrimental to the community AND the candidates. Now if candidate X wishes to withdraw, you have candidates Y and Z who are the only 'real' candidates, only not everyone /sees/ the stated intent of X to drop out of the race - so when time comes to vote, there will be vote leaching by the 'dud' candidate(s) from the 'live' candidate(s). Voters will be voting for candidates that they think are running, but who really have, for all intents and purposes, left.

(And in the extreme case that you have multiple candidates who decide they don't want to run anymore, you could get a council that was voted on as a 5 person council, but which suddenly becomes a 2 person council as soon as elections are over, because 3 of the elected candidates decided to drop out, but officially weren't removable from the list, until all the votes have happened.)

Originally Posted by joerg_rw (Post 1277274)

for sure my SANITY is more important to me than YOU and your weird demonstrations of how you're not getting a single bit of all this. Chill, buddy, council elections are cancelled, they've been before I posted my initial post regarding mentalist and nothing changed since then and probably nothing will change, so all you can lose here is your opportunity to rage against my attempts to bring proper votes to community. I suggest you better ignore this thread since for you it's actually moot.

Originally Posted by Mentalist Traceur (Post 1274042)

Hey, it's a valid statement - we would all hope that that is not the motivation of anyone who runs for a position. It doesn't necessarily mean he's accusing either of you or doing so, or even necessarily implying it's likely. Now, he might be, but I think just his statement by itself doesn't logically necessitate that meaning. (Edit: To be clear, I haven't paid enough attention to the details of what different members feel towards other members, so I don't know or remember if his comment is part of a larger pattern of such remarks)

At any rate, I am a bit confused now: The nomination period for Council and/or Board - are either of those being extended, or..?