Steering Committee votes: add an "abstain" option, and count it to quorum or not?

felixfontein
Mon, 09 Jun 2025 20:08:08 +0000
Project Discussions

@russoz suggested in a comment to a vote that there should be an “abstain” option in votes. @gotmax23 wrote that they like this idea.

I like the idea as well, and started writing about this in the other thread, but then decided that we should better continue this discussion in a new thread - this one

I think we have two questions:

1. Do we want to have an “abstain” option, to indicate that “yes, I read and understand the poll, but no, I really don’t care (for whatever reason), so I’m abstaining from any of the actual selections”?

2. Does the “abstain” option counts to the quorum or not? Right now, it does not, because abstain means not taking part in the vote at all.

My personal take is that we should have an “abstain” option, and that it should count to the quorum. Even if then we could have extreme cases where one person (who happens to be the chairperson) votes for something, one person against, and five abstain: in that case the thing voted on would be accepted, because a) the quorum has been reached, and b) from the actual votes (2) there’s a tie, and thus the chairperson’s vote decides. I think this is OK, since the folks who abstained are basically saying “I don’t care, both options are OK for me”. (If someone doesn’t like both options equally, I think the correct answer would be to pick the “no change” option and make another proposal.)

23 posts - 11 participants