From: lugowski@ils.nwu.edu (Marek Lugowski)
Subject: challenge to result:rec.arts.urdu.poems 303:145
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1992 04:33:29 GMT


To: ali@wv.MENTORG.COM
    the official vote-taker of CVF:rec.arts.poems.urdu:
Cc: news.groups, news.announce.newgroups

At the very instant the result of voting was made public, I requested from
you the complete record of votes, as you publically said it was available
for inspection.  We are now at the end of the 5 day waiting period and I
feel that you are stalling, making it difficult to verify your vote-taking.

I requested all the votes, as you offered to make them available, and
only today I received the bulk of YES ones.  What gives?  The last
vote in the file you sent me is by COOKIEMONSTER <90270@LAWRENCE.EDU>,
truncated.

Clearly the file is too large to pass through mail.  Could you break it
up and mail it in pieces?

I should advise you, that with your claimed 303:145 margin of passage,
5 invalidated votes would suffice to lose the 2/3 requirement and
overturn the passage.  As it happens, there may be firm grounds for
questioning many more than five.

In the official tally you list no INVALID votes, only YES and NO votes.

Many people who voted in your estimation "yes" actually cast ambiguous
votes.  One person is even listed twice in this list of votes you sent
me.  One person is wishing you well and not voting.  In some other
cases the headers indicate that you solicited votes from individual
users ("IN-REPLY-TO") and one even quoted your solicitation in its
entirety while supplying the vote.  Yes, even though on the surface
you solicited votes noncommitally, I believe you did approach people
selectively who you KNEW were likely to vote "yes": they all have
Indian names.

I am going to challenge the vote for rec.arts.poems.urdu as both procedurally
flawed on account of your solicitation and because the 3 calls for votes
were issued to non-identical newsgroups (violates Guidelines), as well as
on account of *far more than five* invalid votes.

The invalid votes are especially easy to demonstrate in the case of
voters excited about some general kind of Urdu newsgroup (remember,
the vote MUST contain all the voting information in order to be
unambiguous, after all, how do you tell a vote from regular e-mail
that might drop in?)  but they don't know what specific newsgroup, or
even that it is a newsgroup -- one person wanted to know when the
mailing list would commence.  One person explicitly voted for
"rec.poems.urdu".  One person even voted for "Urdu gzalahs".  Several
people voted for "an Urdu group".  I think I can already cite more than
enough cases out of your claimed 303 yes votes to tip the ratio of
yes'es to all votes to below 2/3.  145 people had serious objections to
creating this group and I intend to show exactly why: enthusiasm for 
a new newsgroup should not overshadow the misgivings about placing it.

Please be ready to make the entire vote available to the moderator of
news.announce.newsgroups for inspection.  Meanwhile, I request that no
control message for rec.arts.poems.urdu be issued.  Clearly a lot of
its alledged proponents didn't express themselves unambiguously
enough, leading me to believe that this issue was not sufficiently
discussed at RFD.  Indeed, there was an awful lot of silence on the "yes"
side during the Request For Discussion Period, and I am afraid that
this is the price of that "damn the torpedos we will make it happen" silence.

I am awaiting the complete votes as you said you would make them
available.  If you can set up an ftp file that would work very well.

I am planning to contact the news.announce.newgroups moderator with a
copy of this message, and posting it now on news.groups as a matter of
public record.

				-- Marek


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