At the 2024 Annual Meeting, sitting Regional Advocate Tobias Vyseri was elected as a member of the Board of Directors for a term starting 1 October 2024. As a result, the Board of Directors called a special election to fill the vacancy in the Regional Advocate position for Western Provinces. This election only applies to certified members who reside in the Western Provinces region.
This will be an accelerated process to reduce the impact of the position being vacant. In the rest of this article, changes compared to our previous RA election (not counting simple changes to dates or names of offices) are marked with a red line in the left gutter, as seen in this paragraph, or a highlight like this text, if only part of a paragraph has been changed.
Judge Foundry is divided into 11 regions, each of which selects a Regional Advocate. This Regional Advocate’s goal is to foster growth in both the quantity and quality of JF members, and represent their regional concerns to the Board of Directors. You can check out this article from Regional Coordinator Bryan Prillaman for more information on Regional Advocates. Normally, RAs will be elected alongside a new Board of Directors at the annual meeting. An initial extended term was elected earlier this summer, to get this new role kick-started, for a term ending November 1, 2025.
This Special Election is required because that extended term overlapped with a Board election, which usually will not happen. Usually, RA and Board elections will happen at the same time, and the Instant Runoff Votes for RA can be re-counted if a candidate becomes ineligible.
This election is open only to candidates and voters from the Western Provinces region. Eligible Level 2 or higher members of Judge Foundry may nominate themselves, and any Level 1 or higher member of Judge Foundry may vote. (Future elections will also include other roles, such as Operations certifications, as those roll out.) Members may participate in the election only for their own region. In this article, we lay out the schedule for the election of RAs, provide instructions for candidates and voters, and describe some technical details of the voting process.
Schedule and Links
Note: A full schedule, and all relevant links, are available from the Election Index page.
Candidates
Eligible Candidates
Judge Foundry members can run for Regional Advocate if:
- They are Level 2 or higher Judges, or hold an equivalent operations certification. For this election, as operations certifications have not yet been rolled out, only L2+ Judges are eligible.
- They live in the region they are running for, or receive an exemption to this requirement from the Elections Committee and the Regional Coordinator.
- They are not employed by or responsible for staffing for a major TO. This includes being responsible for selecting staff for events with 15 or more judges and staff members.
- They are not a current member of the Board of Directors.
Nominations
Members may nominate themselves today. Only self-nominations are accepted – if you think someone else should run, please encourage them to nominate themselves.
Nominees may (but are not required to) include a nomination statement of up to 4,000 characters. Nominees will receive a link allowing them to edit their response to the google form, allowing them to update their statement any time before the deadline.
When nominations are received, the Elections Committee will verify eligibility and notify the nominee of the decision.
The Election Index page has a list of offices, and a list of nominees for each office, which will be updated as nominations are accepted. Only candidate names will be published during the nomination window.
Pages for each candidate will be created on the Judge Foundry Elections Site at the conclusion of the nominations window. Nomination statements and answers to questions will be published on these pages.
If a member is considering nominating themselves, but has questions regarding expectations, or the definition of the position, they can email rc@judgefoundry.org with any questions or concerns they may have.
Q&A
Eligible voters may ask questions of all of the candidates for the position of RA within their own region. Each voter may pose up to two questions, which should be concise and neutrally worded. Users submitting this form must identify themselves to the Elections Committee to verify eligibility, but their name will not be shared with the candidate or published.
The Elections Committee will review questions, and will combine, reword, or exclude questions as needed to achieve the following goals: Questions should be clear, concise, neutrally phrased, and directly related to the office sought; they should not repeat other questions, contain the asker’s personal opinion, or serve as an attack on any person. Questions will be submitted to the candidates via email.
Candidates are not required to answer any or all questions, but questions will be published regardless of whether an answer is received. Candidates may submit an answer of up to 1,500 characters for each question.
Candidate Conduct
If a candidate’s nomination statement or answer to any question exceeds the character limits, or in the opinion of the Elections Committee, is unfit for publication due to incivility or personal attacks, it may be returned to the candidate with an explanation.
Candidates are free to discuss their candidacy in other spaces, subject to the rules and norms of those spaces. Conduct of candidates in spaces other than the Judge Foundry Elections Site will not be regulated by the Elections Committee.
Voters
Eligible Voters
A preliminary list of eligible voters is available through this filtered JudgeApps list. Please check that your information is correct. This list will be updated automatically with any changes in membership, level, and region. A final voter list will be generated based on that list on the record date for this election.
Members who are suspended (e.g., for non-payment of dues) are not eligible to vote. These members are notified by email, but will still appear on the above JudgeApps list. The Board of Directors will provide the Elections Committee with a list of suspended members on the record date, and those members will be removed from the final voter list.
If you believe that you have been incorrectly included in or excluded from the list, or if we have not marked the correct region for you (based on the Judge Foundry regions announced here), please email the Elections Committee at elections@judgefoundry.org.
You can also contact us at elections@judgefoundry.org any time before voting if there are significant and exceptional circumstances justifying why you should be allowed to run or vote in a region other than the one you reside in.
Q&A
Once the full list of nominees has been announced, you can ask questions of the nominees within your region. See the Q&A section above for more details on this process.
Voting
When the elections are opened, our online election provider will email you a link to your ballot. Please see this article for a walk-through on the type of ballot that will be used for this election. Note that for cost efficiency, we may use a different website for this election, but the ballot is similar. Examples of this alternate system are also available.
Ballots will be sent to your verified email address on file in JudgeApps.
Don’t forward or share your email. If you share the link, or forward the ballot email, then someone else could use your ballot to vote on your behalf.
If you notice any issue with your ballot, such as being sent a ballot for the wrong region, do not submit your vote, and contact the Elections Committee at elections@judgefoundry.org.
If you do not receive a ballot, contact the Elections Committee at elections@judgefoundry.org.
Please be careful while voting your ballot. Once your ballot is submitted to our election provider, no one can invalidate or change your selections. Our election provider ensures that no one can see who you voted for.
Technical Details
Voting System
Regional Advocate elections use Instant Runoff Voting. Voters will be presented a list of candidates in a random order. They can assign ranks to each candidate, where their preferred candidate is rank 1, their second preference is rank 2, and so on. Voters do not need to rank all of the candidates.
In IRV, each voter’s first preferences are tallied. The candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated, and voters’ preferences are moved to the next preference listed on their ballot, until a candidate wins by reaching more than 50% of the votes.
Vote Counting
When we close the election, the results will automatically be counted and displayed by the election provider. Information provided by them is for auditing purposes, and is not official until the Elections Committee reviews, audits, and certifies the results.
Publishing Results
After the voting is complete, the Elections Committee will publish the list of winners, the list of ballots (presented in a random order without voter identification), and the list of eligible voters showing which voters actually submitted a vote.
Exceptions
If there is only one nominee for any given region, that nominee will win by default without an election taking place for that region.
If there are no nominees for any given region, the Regional Coordinator and Elections Committee will discuss options to proceed, including extending deadlines and modifying eligibility requirements.
The Regional Coordinator and Elections Committee may modify timelines or other procedures above if needed to respond to unexpected circumstances.
If any election ends in a tie, and the election provider does not use tie breaking to report a winner or uses random tie breaking, tiebreakers will be calculated by the Election Committee using backwards tie breaking. If a tie remains after this point, the Regional Coordinator will have the authority to decide how to proceed.