Application for BCA Secretary

[mikem]

Last year the BMC had almost 68OO people vote electronically & only about 1OO at the meeting (scroll down for the AGM report - they have about 75OOO members, 51OOO individual & 24OOO
through 28O clubs):
https://www.thebmc.co.uk/bmc-agm-2018

 

[MarkS]

flaws that can be fixed (i.e. the BCA's poor definition of a club)

Altering the definition of a club would not 'fix' the current system. It may make it a bit less bad.

The club voting system prevents the system becoming more broken. As there are no check as to whether DIMs are real people, i could sign up to the BCA 100 times for the not so astronomical sum of ?2200. This is well within the means of individuals and clubs.

Getting rid of the club voting system does not mean that it becomes one man one vote. It just becomes how many votes can one man buy.

The current system is not very representative and unnecessarily complicated in that 1 house arbitrarily gives the same weighting to different groups whatever their size, and members have to turn up in person to vote.

Discussion of fraud seems a bit of a leap from this subject, and any system (including the current one) is open to abuse in some form.

In the council elections last week all I had to do was provide my name and address. I could have gone in later pretending to be a neighbour/friend/whoever.

 

[Jenny P]

I suspect it's the perception that "others" may somehow get one over on you which is the problem - not any evidence of fraud attempted by anyone.

What is apparent from past BCA AGMs held at venues in different caving regions is that the numbers of local cavers from wherever the meeting is held will always outweigh those who have to travel a distance.  This can lead to a perception that "they" have an inordinately large effect on the voting on points which are contentious.  That's why getting electronic voting up and running is so important: because it means that there that there can be no "regional bias" in decisions reached nationally.

It still won't be perfect but it's bound to be at least some improvement on the present system.  It also means we would have to re-think how we arrange AGMs and proposals so that cavers are able to vote electronically.  Certainly BMC would seem to have something to teach us in this respect.