More on Unlock Democracy’s internal elections

Earlier this year I blogged about my dissatisfaction with the process used by Unlock Democracy, the constitutional reform campaigning organisation, to elect members to its governing council. I was unhappy with the way the rules prevented campaigning and made it really difficult to choose between the candidates available. I made a contrast with my experience of last year’s electoral reform society elections and talked about how the Liberal Democrats have recently implemented some much more, well, liberal rules for their internal elections.

That post generated a response from Unlock Democracy’s director, Peter Facey, which, not unreasonably, said that if you don’t like how it’s being done why not contribute to a debate about how we could improve things. So that resulted in a further post from me where I outlined my ‘10 principles for the management of internal elections in membership organisations‘.

I was reminded of this when recently the paperwork for Unlock Democracy’s Annual General Meeting came through my letterbox. Given that an AGM is the place to propose changes for how an organisation is run I had a vague sense of guilt that maybe I should be doing a bit more about this issue. I needn’t have worried. Ever reliable on such matters as these, Mark Pack (along with current Unlock Democracy Council member Chris Carrigan) has been organised enough to get a motion together to go to the AGM to make just such a change.

Mark has blogged about what he is proposing over on Liberal Democrat Voice: ‘Are you a member of unlock democracy? Please help improve it‘.

Do these proposals meet my 10 principles? Yes, by and large I think they do. So the very least I can do, I’ve decided, is to make sure that I turn up at the AGM and vote for these rule changes.

If you are a member of Unlock Democracy I would encourage you to do the same. But if you can’t attend you can get a proxy vote. You need to specifically ask for one however, which you can do using the form on the organisation’s website.

This content was originally posted on my old Strange Thoughts blog.