 The final vote has come under much criticism because of the relatively small percentage of the 9000-strong membership who participated. Besides the fact that most members do not attend the General Assemblies, this lack was also due to the timing of the vote: the final vote was taken on the last day of the 10-day event, after many participants had left or were preparing to leave. The claim is that only 424 astronomers were present for the vote, which is less than 5 % of the entire community of astronomers. However, sampling 400 representative members out of a population of 9,000 statistically yields a result with good accuracy (confidence interval better than 5 %). There is also the issue of the many astronomers who were unable or who chose not to make the trip to Prague and, thus, cast no vote. Astronomer Marla Geha has clarified that not all members of the Union were needed to vote on the classification issue: only those whose work is directly related to planetary studies.
