TEI-C and TAPAS Election Process

Procedure
According to the TEI Bylaws, elections for Board and Council are held at the Annual Meeting (commonly called the “business meeting” or “members’ meeting” portion of the TEI conference). As the Bylaws explain in the sections for the Board and Council, “each elected [vacant] position shall be voted on as a separate matter with each Member entitled to vote receiving one vote for each such position”. This has long been interpreted to mean that each Member has equal voting rights rather than to specify a voting system in which the Member can only select one candidate rather than rank them. Accordingly, the TEI has long used a ranked voting system, first with manual tabulation and later using OpaVote for automated tabulation.

The TEI webmaster has conducted the elections on OpaVote using his personal Google account. As David Sewell, former TEI webmaster, explained in January 2015:


 * Since the start of using OpaVote I've always selected "Scottish STV" as the voting Method. It's one of several STV methods supported by OpaVote (http://www.openstv.org/single-transferable-vote), and I chose it because (1) the rules were quite similar to the ones applied manually in prior TEI elections, and (2) OpaVote calls it "a straightforward implementation of STV and recommended to organizations using STV for the first time."


 * Some of the other implementations use fancier computer algorithms but have rather obscure options. If any stats-minded Council or Board member wants to revisit the counting methods now would be a good time.


 * I'd strongly suggest that you create a dummy test election with 3-4 email addresses (your own, mine if you like) to see how everything works, including the way emails & the web page appear, before trying to create an actual election.

And he added in October 2015:


 * 1) OpaVote ties voting eligibility to email addresses, as you observe. It is not possible to give the same human being two votes by duplicating the email address; only one ballot per email address will be sent. (In an older version of OpaVote I discovered that changing the case of an email address was a hack that could be used to provide multiple votes to one person, but I think they fixed things so that no longer works.)


 * 2) Some human beings are eligible to cast more than one vote in TEI elections, because they are electors under multiple criteria (individual member + institutional representative for example). In those cases, you need to ask them to supply a second, different email address to use for the second ballot, and then add that manually.


 * 3) The list of voters for the TEI Board of Directors election is composed of email addresses of institutional contacts, many of whom might not prefer to be the one casting the vote. It should be possible to forward a ballot to someone else to cast the vote.

The Bylaws also discuss the appointment of electors for each Institutional Member.

OpaVote requires payment for elections featuring above a certain number of candidates and voters. TEI elections usually require some payment for elections, and it is best to pay for an amount of voters around 25% above the current voter count due to last minute voters being added.

Nominating Committee
Blurb about committee make-up; point to the Bylaws


 * TEI-C_List_of_Nominating_Committees

Timeline
Blurb about timeline


 * TEI-C_and_TAPAS_Election_Timeline

Dissemination of Call for Nominations
Call for Nominations to stand for TEI-C and TAPAS elections is mainly distributed via email using the following template:
 * TEI-C_and_TAPAS_Call_for_Nominations

The following listservs and other online platforms are generally targeted:


 * TEI-L
 * DLF-ANNOUNCE (MD)
 * DHSI
 * ACRL Digital Humanities Interest Group: acrldigitalhumanitiesig@lists.ala.org (MD)
 * ADHO Libraries Special Interest Group: libdh-sig@lists.digitalhumanities.org (MD)
 * TEILIB-L (MD)
 * DH+Lib Blog (MD)
 * XTF Users Group: libdh-sig@lists.digitalhumanities.org (MD)
 * HUMANIST
 * WWP-ENCODING@LISTSERV.NEU.EDU (MD)

List of Candidates
A list of candidates should be created at www.tei-c.org/Membership/Meetings/YYYY/mmNN.xml (where “NN” is the next available sequence: compare with what’s in the previous year’s folder). Be sure to link to it from www.tei-c.org/Membership/Meetings/YYYY/index.xml.

Dissemination for Elections
Contact electors through WildApricot to ask them to vote and provide a link to the ballot. This step has been done via the Treasurer and/or Chair of the Board generating a list or lists of voters and providing them to the Webmaster since the list of eligible voters fluctuates wildly around the time of the election. Additional voters will often have to be added one by one.

Institutional members should be contacted at least a week before the elections open to alert the designated electors of the upcoming elections. Often, the membership contact person is not the elector.


 * Elections, Boilerplate for Alerting Institutional Members

Be sure to send an announcement to TEI-L as well to catch anyone who might not have received their ballot.