ICANN's Global Elections: On the Internet, For the Internet

A Study of the ICANN At-Large Elections by
Common Cause and the Center for Democracy and Technology

March 2000

Appendix I: Study Procedure

Prior to the November 1999 meeting in Los Angeles, the ICANN board adopted an amendment to the bylaws that established a basic framework for the At-Large elections. [12] At the Los Angeles meeting, many members of the ICANN community expressed concern with the amendment, and voiced more general criticisms of the At-Large election process.

Common Cause and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) were asked by the Markle Foundation and others in the public interest community to provide an independent assessment of these concerns and the At-Large elections as a whole. Our procedure for conducting this study involved both reaching out to members of the ICANN community and soliciting input from experts in online voting, democratic process, and international elections.

A. Outreach within the ICANN Community
B. Election Experts

A. Outreach within the ICANN Community

A significant part of this study involved outreach to the ICANN community to gather opinions on the problems with the current election process and possible solutions to those problems. The scope of our outreach was necessarily limited by time and resource constraints, and we were not able to speak with as many ICANN participants as we would have liked to under ideal circumstances. In particular, we must acknowledge that our outreach to overseas participants was limited, and our perspective on certain issues has been influenced by our experience working primarily on issues involving U.S. policy.

We sought to gather input from a broad cross-section of the ICANN community. Those consulted for this study included leaders from the nonprofit community, corporations and industry groups, intellectual property and trademark interests, registrars and registries, and technical standard organizations. We also made an effort to include international leaders from each of these groups. Our contact with these participants took place via email, phone calls, group conference calls and in-person meetings.

During our outreach, we posed the following three issues for discussion:

1) What is the purpose of the At-Large election, and how does it relate to ICANN's mission?

2) Do you agree or disagree with the current election rules? Please describe why you agree or disagree.

3) Do you have ideas for how the At-Large election might be improved?

We found that these questions provoked an interesting discussion among members of the ICANN community. Although responses that we received varied, we were able to identify some common themes among the concerns raised and suggested remedies proposed. These themes are discussed in detail in Section 3 and Section 4 of this report.

List of Individuals Consulted [13]

[Top] [Outreach within the ICANN Community] [Election Experts]

B. Election Experts

In addition to reaching out to participants in the ICANN process, the ICANN Election Study brought fresh perspectives to the At-Large membership debate by engaging elections experts from outside the ICANN community.

On February 9th 2000, Common Cause and the Center for Democracy and Technology invited experts in democratic process, elections, and online voting to the Kennedy School of Government for a roundtable discussion on the ICANN At-Large election process. [14] The participants in the discussion contributed many different types of expertise - from monitoring elections on an international level, to designing voting systems, to creating secure mechanisms for online voting, to creating rules for campaign finance and election fraud. They provided their perspectives on the complex issues that ICANN faces in establishing these elections.

Participants generally agreed that evaluating the election system is difficult given that ICANN's purpose and the goals of the election are not clear. [15] The insights and suggestions provided by these experts have been included in our analysis in Section 4 of this report.

List of Elections Experts Consulted [16]

Derek Bok, President Emeritus, Harvard University
Charles Costello, The Carter Center
Lorrie Faith Cranor, AT&T Labs Research
Richard Engstrom, University of New Orleans
Jeff Fischer, International Foundation for Election Systems
Ron Gould, Elections Canada
Steven Hill, Center for Voting and Democracy
Arend Lijphart, University of California, San Diego
Peter Molnar, Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics & Public Policy
Joseph Nye, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Drazen Pantic, Center of War & Peace and News Media
Juliana Pilon, International Foundation of Election Systems
Virginia Postrel, Reason Magazine.
Trevor Potter, former Chairman, U.S. Federal Election Commission
Ed Still, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
Tracy Westen, Grassroots.com
Fred Werthheimer, Democracy 21

[Top] [Outreach within the ICANN Community] [Election Experts]

[Next: Appendix II: Letter to the ICANN Board]

[Return to Table of Contents]

12: http://www.icann.org/general/bylaws.htm
13: We would also like to acknowledge the many members of the ICANN community that expressed interest in our study, but were unable to participate due to time and resource constraints.
14: The agenda for the roundtable discussion is available at: http://www.commoncause.org/icann/roundtable/agenda.htm
15: Highlights from this interdisciplinary discussion on the purpose and structure of the ICANN At-Large elections are available at http://www.commoncause.org/icann/roundtable/
16: Biographies of participants are available at http://www.commoncause.org/icann/roundtable/participants.htm Some invitees who could not attend this roundtable also provided us input, including Tracy Westen of Grassroots.com (formerly of the Center for Governmental Studies), Juliana Pilon of the International Foundation of Election Systems, Arend Lijphart of the University of California, San Diego, Virginia Postrel of Reason Magazine.

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