You all ignore the fact that the participants are mostly of those who have an ax to grind regarding userboxes, a self-selected audience. If I had wanted to stuff the ballot, I could have laid in hundreds of notes to polarized user groups from random ips, instead, I spoke to 40-or-so by hand of a fairly neutral group who were directly affected by this ridiculous proposal.  

Also, citing an arbcom ruling rather than policy shows how contrived this is.  Mindspillage asked me to reconsider, he said nothing about policy or blocking. How can you say inviting participants to a Wikipedia-wide issue is disruptive?  How can you say that I should somehow have known that? The real question is, why is this thing not on the main page? The answer is, because most would oppose it, but the anti-userbox admins think they know what is best, and are pulling every trick they can to cram this through.

If you want to design either a jury-pool process or a general election process to decide such things, I'll be happy to help you.

How is this a personal attack, except to note that the mass blanking happened and the perpetrator is documented?  Face it, the ban came only because what I said is unpopular with admins. MarkSweep made hundreds of blanking edits using admin tools, speciously twisted rules into knots and disrupted hundreds of users. He got a slap on the wrist, and polite applause.  I've received notes from admins on this page threatening me for suggesting that his actions constitute vandalism, which they clearly do.  I pass a note pointing this out to a small subset of the hundreds of users affected, I am banned for 31 hours.  How is this not political? Now I'm afraid to contact my own friends here, whom I know to be against this, but do not know about it.

Tacky? Pretending this proposal is put before a representative audience is tacky, as is the slash-and-burn approach taken in the first place, as is the attempts by MarkSweep to fit me with a gag until the end of UPP (that is REALLY tacky), as is the naked political calculation on my AN/I as to how this speaks for their pet proposal, and how it should be played.  The fact is that this proposal will never have community assent because of its deep flaws, and I am resented for pointing this out.  Tacky is pretending in the face of all evidence that there is a basis for consensus here.