The poll for the 2010 Board of Governors has now closed.

Hamish Gibson withdraw before polls opened, leaving 17 candidates for 12 positions.

The successful candidates (in no particular order) are:

Lucas Abedecian (abedecian), Andrew Tindall (andrewtindall), Stephen Ogden (azrael), Will Tovey (duke), Finlay Archibald (finlay_a), Graeme Lambert (glambert), Shaun Dyer (guyincognito), Loz Kaye (lozkaye), Peter Brett (peterbrett), Jack Allnutt (m2ys4u), Will Macdonald (scuzzmonkey), and Mark Wood (scottishduck).

110 votes were cast in all, and no candidates were withdrawn during the vote.

The ballot file may be downloaded here, and those of you who requested a receipt can verify that your vote was recorded correctly.

The count file may be downloaded here and shows the sequence in which the candidates were elected or eliminated.

You can verify the count by running the OpenSTV software yourself, or by analysing it directly. If you have any queries, please email me with details.

The internal election for the Board of Governors will soon be coming up.

This is a little different to internal elections we have held so far, because there are 12 positions to be filled, and which do not have separate responsibilities until the elected Board choose to assign roles from within those elected. Also, we have already had more candidates nominated than there are positions available, so this will be a contested election and not all hopeful candidates will be successful.

Single transferable vote
Since there are many positions to be filled at once, it's been proposed that we implement some form of single transferable vote for this election. This at once both makes some sense and gives us some challenges, to make this possible.

Voting implementation
The current proposal is that the present member voting system be enhanced to allow a preference list up to the number of positions available (but not requiring 12 selections; only as many as voting members wish to choose). The vote preferences will then be collected up, and put into a standard text format ready for counting. The vote list will also be released once the vote is complete for members to verify as desired, without any voter-identifying information/comprising details of the election candidates and the vote preferences chosen only.

This is subject to Tom and the web team confirming the practicality of this, which is being discussed and we will update as that is determined.

Counting the results
For counting the results, we propose to use the Open STV software. This is used by other organisations, rather than being developed specifically within PPUK, and is open source. Members will therefore be able to download the Open STV software, run it against the released ballot file themselves, and also analyse/debug the software as they please, in addition to manually analysing the count process if desired. Note that this part does not provide any guarantee of the integrity of the vote preference results released in the ballot file - but it does make the count process entirely transparent. The software also produces a detailed list of the stage/transfer counts and elections/eliminations.

Re-open nominations
Given the proposed vote implementation, we do not propose to offer a "re-open nominations" choice. This was considered, however there are some issues of practice and of theory with doing so, in a large multi-member election such as ...

Nominations for a number of internal positions have been open for just over a week now. Campaigns officer and Regional Administrator nominations close in just under a week, Monday May 31st, and Governor nominations close in just over three weeks, Thursday 17 June.

Responses so far have been fairly brisk, with a number of Pirates stepping forward and being seconded. If we can get more in the next week and for governor positions, especially from people who already have a record of involvement and activity with the party, that would mean we might have some competition and some real choices for members to make when the votes open. For details of the process and how to put yourself forward, you can find full details in Andrew Tindall's blog post here.

The current volunteers who have come forward and been seconded are as follows:

Campaigns Officer

Peter Brett has volunteered and been seconded for this position.

A contested election is always healthy; will we have any further offers? Admittedly Peter has had considerable support from members for his efforts as Deputy and Acting Campaigns officer, it could only be positive however to have a contested election if we did have anyone else come forward.

Edit: Nominations for this position have now closed 2010-05-31.

Regional Administrative Officer

We have had six people offer to become regional administrator, covering five regions:

London: Chris Monteiro has volunteered and been seconded for this position.

North West England: Jack Allnutt has volunteered and been seconded for this position.

Scotland: Two candidates so far:
Philip Hunt has volunteered and been seconded for this position.
Andrew Paliwoda has volunteered and been seconded for this position.

South East England: Stephen Ogden has volunteered and been seconded for this position.

West Midlands: Daniel Newman has volunteered and been seconded for this position.

Once again, to have more applications and contested elections can only be healthy for us. Also, we have not yet had volunteers come forward for the following regions:

East Midlands; East of England; North East England; South West England; Yorkshire and Humberside

and Wales (where there will be devolved elections next year, like Scotland).

At this point I'm minded to take direct responsibility myself for nominating candidates for any area where no regional administrator is chosen, and to set a policy that I would nominate any Pirate in good standing who wants to stand in local ...

Our present internal organisation is based on the EU regions, because these fit the elections we will be fighting at various levels, and are part of preparing to fight the 2014 European election. Prior to the UK General Election we have just fought, I made interim appointments of regional administrators to a number of these, who have been serving in that role during the campaign.

The time has now come, as we expand, to formalise these roles, and to make them directly elected by the members of that region. Based on what successful regional administrators have been doing, and our future needs, I have outlined here what becoming an elected Regional Administrative Officer will involve.

This is new ground; if you have any comments or suggestions, please send them to me for consideration.

Nomination period and member votes for RAOs

Presently I hope to formally open nominations for Regional Administrative Officers next weekend, from Sunday 16th May, for a period of one week, and that will be followed by a member vote open to members of that region for candidates who present themselves. There are some adjustments to the voting system we presently use to enable that, so if the timescales change I'll provide fresh information as necessary.

These will be announced by email to members by region, and it may be that our records aren't absolutely accurate or that the registered address we have is not currently where the member is located and active. Therefore if you receive those notifications for a region which is incorrect for you when nominations and then voting open, please advise and we will correct that so you can vote for the RAO most relevant to you.

There is only one region (North East England) where we presently have relatively few members, so we may not yet be able to hold a meaningful regional election. After that most areas have quite good PPUK member representation, so I hope we will be able to have a successful officer election; the next most sparse area at present is Wales, however we really need a strong organisation developed there as (like Scotland) we will need to be fighting a devolved election in Wales within a year.

Other upcoming votes

There may also be other nomination periods and member voting happening, for campaigns officer, for deputy treasurer ratifications, and for the newly enacted Board of Governors ...

After a lot of hard work on all sides, we've just fought our first election as the UK pirate party.

Across 9 seats, by my calculations we polled 0.34%, for a total of 1340 votes. Our best result was in Manchester Gorton, where our candidate Tim Dobson polled 236 votes for 0.62% of the vote.

Before this election, we didn't know what level of support we could expect. Nor did we know how to organise ourselves, or how to navigate the election requirements and comply with the law. So this has been a tremendous learning experience for everyone involved, and where we've had false starts and had to begin again, and then found a fresh way forward.

Everything starts somewhere

Everything starts somewhere, and we are now on the map.

Now we need to build on that, and prepare for the next election. With a hung parliament and a likely minority government in the UK, this may happen sooner rather than later. There is much to do, and much hard work to develop further, however we can rightly say that we have made our first mark and that this is only the beginning for us.