The election soon to be held by ICANN‹the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers‹is an unprecedented experiment in online democracy. Its outcome will be watched closely by policymakers and the media; it will bear strongly on ICANNšs ultimate legitimacy and promise as a model for Internet governance; and it will be the cornerstone of ICANNšs own upcoming assessment of the At-Large membership. A major question for those of us who have supported and commented on the election will therefore be: How do we measure the success of ICANN's first-ever elections?

Goals of the Election
Measuring success will be difficult because of the numerous and competing goals for the ICANN elections. Common Cause and CDT cataloged these competing goals in our March 2000 report ICANN's Global Elections: On the Internet, For the Internet:

"While there appears to be little consensus on the ultimate role of the election, several major themes have emerged among the responses that we have heard:

• To give a voice in ICANN's governance to those bound by and affected by ICANN's decisions - a diverse population of potentially tens of millions of people all around the world. A major goal for many is to ensure that ICANN acts "with the consent of the governed." Others articulated this goal as "providing a voice in ICANN to those not already represented in the Supporting Organization structure."

• To select high-quality board members capable of fulfilling ICANN's responsibilities for managing and ensuring stability of essential technical systems.

• To fairly represent the diverse interests of Internet users worldwide, as expressed by an engaged and educated At-Large electorate.

• To avoid "capture" of the board through disproportionate representation of any one organization or interest group.

• To complete the election by September 30, 2000 in order to allow the appointed At-Large board members to be replaced, and to inject an elected voice into the board's ongoing decision-making as quickly as possible."

Satisfying all of these competing demands is almost impossible, as we further noted:

"ICANN faces the daunting goal of seeking a fair ballot, free from capture or fraud, from a potential electorate of millions of Internet users worldwide who have little knowledge of ICANN and little understanding of its mission, in order to select a high-quality board of technically-capable members - all by September of this year. Realistically, without substantial changes to the proposed process, it is difficult to see how this is possible." (emphasis added)

Even the election modifications made since that time do not address many of these fundamental tensions. It is almost certain that, given the constraints under which ICANN is operating, the election will be less than a complete success in some dimensions.

Some Metrics for Success
Within the context of these daunting goals, there are several areas where we might measure the success of the election. Further, it is important that ICANN conduct its election procedures in a transparent fashion, including the public release of all data relating to the election, in order that the public is able to evaluate the extent to which these criteria are met.

The metrics for evaluating the election include:

1. Broad Participation - 1. While only a small fraction of eligible voters have registered, the election should nevertheless have a large number of voters. ICANN set a low goal of 5000 members; over 150,000 have registered worldwide and over 75,000 have activated their memberships. But a key question will be how many ultimately participate in the vote. A further question is whether ICANN sufficiently reached out to the public in order to encourage broad participation in the election. And, in the systems it established to register and activate members, and to conduct the balloting itself, did ICANN do all that was possible in order to facilitate broad public participation?

2. Fair Access to the Ballot - ICANN must offer fair and open access to the ballot. An evaluation of the nominations process should judge whether there was real access to the ballot by alternative candidates, not just those nominated by a Board-dominated committee, and whether a sufficient number of alternative candidates were able to actually make their way onto the ballot in order to give the voters a real choice.

3. Honest and Secure Election Process - There must be no hint of dishonest activity such as fraud, corruption or abuse of authority. Fairness will depend on the accurate and secure counting of votes, equal treatment of voters and of candidates, and impartiality of election officials. More difficult questions include verification of "one-voter-one-vote" and the enforcement of reasonable campaign rules, which have not been well-articulated.

4. Meets Time and Resource Limitations - The election has a constrained budget and a hard November deadline. We should recognize that meeting the deadline, fairly and within budget, is a major goal.

5. Election of High-Quality Directors - Many will view the end product as the ultimate measure of election success: Are the election winners high-quality people who will ably manage ICANN and effectively represent the interests of the Internet community?

6. Freedom From Capture - It is important that no single interest or group of interests be able to unfairly dominate the elections. There has been evidence of national domination of regional elections. Measuring other forms of capture - by particular corporate interests, for example - will be much harder but the available data should be closely scrutinized in order to discern if such efforts at corporate capture were attempted, and whether ICANN took all feasible steps to minimize the problem.

7. A Representative and Engaged Electorate - Number alone are not enough. ICANN's electorate and Directors should also be somewhat representative of the various interests of the numerous stakeholders in ICANN's decisions, including minority viewpoints. The electorate must be educated and engaged as well; an uninformed electorate without a clear understanding of ICANN's mission or issues could be destabilizing or lead ICANN to overstep its authority. Creating an engaged electorate from among the potential voting pool remains a major challenge.

Conclusion
We have a combination of metrics for ICANN's elections, some easily measured, others highly subjective. It is clear that ICANN will fall short in some of these areas, but the above criteria provide some measure of successes and failures likely in this experimental, first-ever ICANN election.

Free Speech | Data Privacy | Government Surveillance | Cryptography | Domain Names | International | Bandwidth | Security | Internet Standards, Technology and Policy Project | Terrorism | Authentication | Right to Know | Spam

Our Mission / Get Involved / Staff / Publications / Links / Search CDT / Jobs / Action! Previous Headlines | Legislative Tracking | CDT's Privacy Policy