Audit the.... LNC?

It has been a rollercoaster ride since the close of the National Convention - see https://steemit.com/libertarian-party/@pinkflame/the-parliamentary-gordian-knot-that-the-lp-faces. But the Judicial Committee has not been the only hot topic but our entire voting system for LNC members. In 2016, I used to do a performance art piece called "Me Voting at the LP Convention" and it involved me being given a napkin and tearing it into shreds to jot down a name or two. That was an exaggeration. But not by much.

Everything is still done by hand in a maddeningly slow and error-prone process without any solid practices of electoral hygiene (i.e. making sure that all involved in the counting and telling process are disinterested parties).

This was brought to a head by the At-Large Representative race results which were hamstrung by running out of time so that only two candidates received a majority of the vote so that a suspension of the rules (dubious in my opinion) was made in order to switch the requirement from a majority vote to a plurality vote so that the additional three representatives would be the next top vote getters. But that is only one way to word it. It is also true that they were disapproved by the convention on the first ballot since the ballot was done with approval, and not plurality, voting.

That is a problem that needs to be fixed.

But even more fundamental was the fact that the delegations never got a preview of their vote totals during a time that they could object. These were not available until an hour or so after the adjournment of the convention and it turns out that the top three were the top three by a very slim margin, and in one case, by a one vote margin. Would the delegates have made the same decision with this information? We cannot know. I suspect not.

But it did reveal that we need a robust system of vote auditing with protocols of electoral hygiene. In the past, Secretary Alicia Mattson has on her own conducted very thorough, and very helpful voluntary audits of votes that have always revealed understandable errors. It is about time that the LNC and the Libertarian Party adopt a standard auditing protocol of LNC election votes. Perhaps this needs to be a duty of the already-existing Audit Committee. But things cannot continue as they are.

None of this is personal to anyone and none of it is meant at all to cast any suspicions of hanky-panky. It is though to hold ourselves to the same standards we expect our candidates in the public sphere to be treated under. We would never tolerate our candidate losing by a one-vote margin with clearly interested persons engaging in the audit and with no standard audit protocol. This protects everyone and is us living the principles we espouse.

Our whole system needs revamped and this is a large part.