> Karl, in the USA his point is very valid. My wife has a number of
> relations, in "Cajun country" that couldn't even prove their right to
> American citizenship.
The point is that all I need to do is look at her to know that she is a
person. In the context of voting, it is not even important to know her
name, only that she has not voted twice in the same election.
(I have a good friend who went through hell trying to get a US passport --
the county clerk's office had been burglarized and the master copies of
her birth certificate had been stolen, along with thousands of others, and
the US thought that she might be someone trying to use the stolen
certificate.)
> MHSC can be verified better
> than some of my wife's family, just call the DE state offices,
Yes, I can verify MHSC. But MHSC can't act except through people, usually
its officers and agents. So it is you, exercising MHSC's powers, that one
has to also verify. And that brings us back to "who is this person".
> Also, most 14 year olds do not carry any form of
> identification.
Which raises a very good question -- do we want an age limitation on
membership? (I.e. nobody under 18?) I'd suggest that this may be a good
thing to consider.
If so, then there is ancillary question - do parents get to vote for their
children.
(We are starting to go into the weeds on some of these tangents.)
> No adult is required to have identification....
At least not in the US. But then if you want to do something... like
drive a car, leave the country, receive non-trivial amounts of income,
etc. Then one requires identification.
As an aside -- There's an interesting thing that one may have missed in
the newspapers this last week -- some of the States are selling their
database of drivers license photos (and names) to private companies.
> .... However, a corp must have papers at all times.
They keep 'em in the files of their offices. The officers and agents
don't generally carry around the articles or the Secretary of State's
certificate. And even if they did, there is nothing that says that they
aren't just random, non-associated people carrying around those papers.
> >Corporations don't carry their articles around and one can never be sure
> >whether a corporate spokesman is really speaking for a real corporation
> >without doing some background checking.
>
> Try to get a bank account under your corporate name, I had to submit a copy
> of the articles, DE paperwork, and EIN certificate. Further, I had to
> provide personal ID and a copy of the minutes of the BoD meeting that
> empowered me to establish a financial account. That was Wells Fargo in
> California, it was just as bad with BankOne in Colorado.
ICANN would have to do the same kind of checking as the bank did.
And who knows that at the next BoD meeting that you weren't relieved of
all association with the corporation. (I'm not speaking of you
personally, but simply using you as an example. ;-)
As an aside - I've also had to jump through that hoop, many times. (In my
role as corporate officer I've been called by banks who wan to verify that
my corporation has me as an employee. It's fun say "hmmm, let me check our
personnel records" then shuffle papers, click on the keyboard, and
evenatually say "oh yes, here it is..." ;-)
> >But such an exchange of documents really doesn't prove anything -- the
> >documents could be forged or simply copies of real documents being passed
> >on by people having nothing to do with the actual corporation.
>
> What you don't know is that you are both supposed to check, with respective
> state offices, each others identification. Whether or not either party does
> this is irrelevent.
The state only holds the articles and a yearly statement of the officers.
(I don't remember whether California wants the names of the board
members.)
So checking with the state doesn't do much except give one a potentially
stale listing of officers. One can, of course, contact the listed
officers and ask if the purported voting agent for ICANN does in fact have
the authority at the current time. But even then you don't have positive
clarity that those officers are in fact still officers and are telling you
the truth.
The point being in all this is that there are substantial difficulties
when validating a corporate voter -- one must validate the corporation
itself, then the chain of authority that delegates corporation's
authority to the voter, and then finally one must validate that the voter
(which is necessarily a human) is in fact the actual person to whom the
delegation has been made.
Suppose Jeff Williams were to wander up and say he is the designated voter
for INEG.... We'd have to prove INEG exists. We'd have to prove that it
delegated voting authority to somebody named "Jeff Williams", and finally
when the vote is case, we would have to prove that it came from the same
"Jeff Williams" as referred to in the delegation.
Not easy.
It's a lot easier to simply grant some sort of public-key based
certificate to each enfranchised voter (whether they be corporations or
individuals) and say "possession of this certificate will let you vote
exactly once in each election".
Then the issue devolves into ensuring that we give each corporation and
individual only one such cerficate. That's the hard part.
(We'd also need to have a mechanism to invalidate lost certificates and
replace 'em with new ones.)
> >It would be unfair to give such a corporate family a multiplicity of
> >votes.
>
> why?
Because generally the structuring of what appears to be a monolithic
company into many corporations is really nothing more than a response to
tax laws, accounting policies, a desire to have national subsidiaries,
etc. It does not usually reflect a significant change in the management
that decides how the vote is cast.
In other words, the same people will usually decide how each corporation
in the corporate family will vote.
If this were allowed, to be fair, one should then allow individuals to
vote one time for each nickname they have.
(Just think - a single person with multiple personality disorder could
form multiple, opposing, political parties. ;-)
To keep things sane it all comes back to the same bottom line:
One person, one vote; one organization/corporation, zero vote.
--karl--
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