Anyone else not received their BCA voting code?

Requested mine 3 times - and no it is not in my spam

Jopo

Hi Jopo, same here.

Hi Both,

I'm sorry to hear that you've been having trouble. I have been receiving a fair few emails about missing ballot IDs, but have dealt with every email I've received.

How have you been requesting your Ballot IDs - by email to returning-officer@british-caving.org.uk? If your emails are not getting through to us then that's obviously not good news - could you PM me your email addresses so that I can troubleshoot and get you your Ballot IDs?

Thank you for your help, and my apologies for the difficulty you've encountered so far!

All the best,
Ari

Is somebody trying to sabotage the vote  ? After all that has happened this can not be
not be the case ,or is it ,heaven forbid !

braveduck said:

Is somebody trying to sabotage the vote  ? After all that has happened this can not be
not be the case ,or is it ,heaven forbid !

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Do you write for Dankness Below?

I posted the below in response to a comment on the BCA website, which should assuage any concerns over foul play due to the "missing ballots".



We have thousands of members for whom we have an email address that we could send the Ballot IDs to. When we sent out the Ballot ID emails we recorded a bounce rate of about 3%. For the vast majority of these the member has changed their email address but the BCA hasn?t been informed. For a few of these their email address was entered incorrectly in the membership database (such as using [at] instead of @), and for a handful of members we believe that their email provider blocked the email because it considered it suspicious that the BCA sent out so many emails simultaneously.

All those who have contacted the returning officer have been offered a solution, and we have had only 2 reports of people unable to contact the returning officer, who we have now reached out to directly.

Addendum: The vast majority of those who have contacted the returning officer have found their Ballot ID in their "Spam" or "Promotions" folders.

You sent me my Id No because I requested it thank you ,but BCA have had my correct email
a long time and I got notification for the last ballot .My wife has had to request one and she got notification of the last ballot !

Much gratitude to ari, I have just voted. Maybe I did not push hard enough when I became aware that I should have received the ballot but didn't. I am quite a busy man, but ari made life easier for me. Thanks.

I have had the same email address for more than twenty years. Didn't get  voting code. I haven't had  a response to my email to the returning officer either. It was sent on the 15th.

braveduck said:

You sent me my Id No because I requested it thank you ,but BCA have had my correct email
a long time and I got notification for the last ballot .My wife has had to request one and she got notification of the last ballot !

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Are you sure they've had your email? The BPC decided they don't hand over members emails to the BCA for some strange reason.

mrdoc, I've PM'ed you so we can get you your ballot ID.

braveduck said:

BCA have had my correct email a long time and I got notification for the last ballot .My wife has had to request one and she got notification of the last ballot !

Click to expand...

mrodoc said:

I have had the same email address for more than twenty years. Didn't get  voting code.

Click to expand...

This is very likely the case for some of our members unfortunately, and for this I apologise. This issue highlights the importance of the membership management overhaul that we're currently undertaking.

At the moment the person sending the ballots has to trust the data given to them by the person who manages membership, who themselves has to trust the data given to them by the clubs. Firstly, this is done entirely on spreadsheets, so the potential for error is high. Secondly, we ultimately have to trust our member clubs. If one year a club does not give us a members email address then we must assume that is because the member doesn't want us to have it. We used to use BCA Online to allow members to bypass their clubs and give us their email addresses anyway, but BCA Online has been out-of-service for more than a year now.

The difficulty now is: how do we contact members to get them their Ballot IDs so that they can vote if we don't have their email address? We can't assume that we have their permission to use the same email address that they used last year, because their club have told us that they are not contactable by email. What we did is posted about it on UKCaving, Facebook, Twitter, and our Website, and then send an email to all club secretaries asking them to distribute to their members that they should have received a Ballot ID and if not to get in touch with the BCA to resolve this.

Given the circumstances I feel that we've tried pretty hard to reach all our members one way or another (even looking on UKCaving for members who have had difficulty).

On which note; if you haven't yet received a Ballot ID please email returning-officer@british-caving.org.uk and if you do not get a response within 24 hours please contact it@british-caving.org.uk.

My code received after a requested pm and acted upon. Thanks Ari.

Jopo

I can totally sympathise with the situation Ari and his team are encountering, and his summary above is absolutely spot on. We encountered the exact same hurdles. The current system just doesn't work and needs to be fixed. GDPR was probably the final nail in the coffin for the existing system. Thankfully, a few of the people who were obstructive to changing the current system have now moved on, allowing for a completely fresh start. Hopefully Ari and his team will now have more support, fewer obstacles and a clearer run at delivering something new and innovative.

I think the team have done an excellent job of getting this online vote to happen under very tricky circumstances.

Be warned all the communications from BCA went into my spam folder and I missed the first!

Sending one email is easy.

Sending lots is very hard, as unless you tick every box they will get rejected as spam.

When I get a message to expect a email from a group I always check my spam. If you empty your spam folder frequently you will spot those which count.

Jopo

Some email systems will also let you mark erroneous spam mails like this as 'Not Spam' for future use. It doesn't always work (I still get some charity mails I'm subscribed to dumped in there), but it usually does, and as mentioned above, frequent manual checking will override any software glitches.

if it does go into your spam dont just follow the link move it out of apam and flag as not spam.
Most mail systems (google hot mail MS etc) will use this to train white lists based on sender so if lots of people say not spam it lowers the chance of it ending in spam next time!