Author: Elections Chair

The election has opened!

Every OTW member who joined between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2022 should have a ballot by now. If you didn’t get one, please check your spam folder first, then contact us via our contact form. Please note that your donation receipt will be dated in US Eastern Time, so if your donation is listed after 19:59 on June 30, 2022 on the receipt, you won’t be eligible to vote. If you are unsure whether your donation was made before the deadline, please contact our Development and Membership Committee by using the contact form on our website and selecting “Is my membership current/Am I eligible to vote?” .

The election will run through August 15, 2022, 23:59 UTC; check this time zone converter to find out what time that will be for you.

At this time, all members of the OTW who are eligible to vote should have received an email linking to the voting instructions for 2022. The subject line was “Voting Instructions for Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) Board Election”. Please note that anyone who didn’t receive this email is not on the voter rolls this year and will not receive a ballot.

The voting instructions email contains a link to a test version of the ballot. Please follow that link to make sure that the page displays correctly and the candidates are visible. If not, please ensure you are not blocking JavaScript from ajax.googleapis.com, bootstrapcdn.com, and/or opavote.com.

If you are an OTW member and didn’t receive this email, please do the following:

1. Check your spam folder.
   • If you use Gmail, check your Social tab.
   • If the email is marked as spam, unmark it. Otherwise, you will not receive your ballot, as it will end up in spam as well.
2. If no email is present, open your donation receipt and check the date.
   • To vote in this election, your receipt must be dated between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2022, inclusive of both dates. Receipts are dated in EDT time zone but the cutoff is in UTC; your receipt may list June 30, 2022 but you won’t be eligible if the donation was after midnight UTC on July 1.
   • If you paid by check, your membership is measured by the arrival date of the check.
3. If your donation was made during the eligible time period, make sure you checked the box to become a member. Membership is voluntary for those who donate at least $10; only members can vote.
4. If you did become a member, make sure you neither marked any email from the OTW as spam nor opted out of OTW emails or last year’s ballot. If you did so and would like to vote this year, you’ll need to follow step 5 below.
5. If you donated at least $10 during the eligible period and you checked the box to become a member, please fill out the Elections Contact Form and select the topic “Is my membership current/Am I eligible to vote?” Make sure to include the email you used when donating.
   • Membership has no connection to being a user of AO3 or Fanlore. Please don’t give us your AO3 or Fanlore username – we have no way of knowing who that name belongs to, and we don’t want to know.

Most importantly, if your voting instructions email bounces, gets marked as spam, or you opt out, you will not receive a ballot for this year’s election, and you may not receive a ballot next year. Similarly, if any of those things happened to last year’s election emails, you will not receive a ballot this year. Therefore, if you previously opted out of OTW emails or marked them as spam and would like to vote, fill out the Elections Contact Form and select the topic “Is my membership current/Am I eligible to vote?”

Candidates Announcement

The Organization for Transformative Works is pleased to announce the following candidates for the 2022 Election (in alphabetical order by given name):

• Heather M
• Michelle S
• Natalia G
• Noémie B
• Tiffany G

Candidates’ full legal names will not be publicly posted this year unless they are appointed or elected to the Board.

E. Anna Szegedi is stepping down from her position on the Board for personal reasons, and so there will be 3 open seats in this year’s election, one of them a partial term of two years. The candidate who places third will be elected to this seat. We are grateful for Anna’s service and thank her for her work and dedication.

Because we have 3 seats to be filled and 5 candidates, the 2022 election will be contested – that is, the members of the OTW will vote on which candidates fill the seats.

The Elections Committee is excited to introduce the candidates to all of the members of the OTW! Included in this post are links to short Bios and Platforms written by the candidates. This post also marks the beginning of our Q&A period, during which we invite the public to submit questions for the candidates. Additionally, we will be holding a series of live chats – dates and times for those are to be announced based on candidate availability. Information on the voting period and how to vote will also be posted shortly.

In the meantime, there is a timeline of Elections events available here for your reference. Read on to learn more about our candidates and how you can submit questions for them!

Platforms and Bios

We asked each candidate to provide us with a Bio that sums up their professional and fannish experience, as well as to write a Platform about their goals for their term on the Board by answering the following questions:

• Why did you decide to run for election to the Board?
• What skills and/or experience would you bring to the Board?
• Choose one or two goals for the OTW that are important to you and that you would be interested in working on during your term. Why do you value these goals? How would you work with others to achieve them?
• What is your experience with the OTW’s projects and how would you collaborate with the relevant committees to support and strengthen them? Try to include a range of projects, though feel free to emphasize particular ones you have experience with.
• How would you balance your Board work with other roles in the OTW, or how do you plan to hand over your current roles to focus on Board work?

You can read both the candidates’ answers to these questions and their bios by following the links below.

• Heather M
• Michelle S
• Natalia G
• Noémie B
• Tiffany G

Question & Answer (Q&A)

Candidates will also answer questions from the public. Anyone may submit questions via the Elections form. Please submit all questions by 11:59pm UTC on June 26 (what time is that where I live?). All candidates will answer each question submitted, subject to the following restrictions:

• Questions can be a maximum of 50 words long.
• Questions must not be repeats of questions from the Platforms. This is to allow candidates to spend their time answering new questions.
• Similar questions will be grouped together so candidates don’t have to repeat themselves. Elections staff will decide which questions are similar enough to group.
• If you have a follow-up to a Platform question, please specifically mention that it is a follow-up so it isn’t treated as a repeat.

The posting date for answers will be chosen depending on the number of questions received. Posts will be spread out, arranged by topic, to make it easier for voters to read all the answers.

The OTW Elections committee is pleased to announce that the timeline for the 2022 election for new members of the Board of Directors has been posted!

This year’s election will be held August 12-15. This means that the deadline for volunteers to declare their candidacy is June 17.

As usual, the election membership deadline is June 30. If you’re interested in voting, please make sure your membership is active as of that date. Please note that your donation receipt will be dated in US Eastern Time, so if your donation is listed after 19:59 on June 30, 2022 on the receipt, you won’t be eligible to vote. If you are unsure whether your donation was made before the deadline, please contact our Development and Membership Committee by using the contact form on our website and selecting “Is my membership current/Am I eligible to vote?”. Read More

Now that the 2021 election is over, we’re happy to share with you our voter turnout statistics!

For the 2021 Election, we had 11231 total eligible voters. Of those, 2305 voters cast a ballot, which represents 20.5% of the potential voters.

Our voter turnout is lower than that of last year, which had a turnout of 21.4%.

We also saw a decrease in the number of ballots cast, from 2858 to 2305, which represents a 19.3% decrease.

Elections is committed to continuing to reach out to our eligible members to encourage them to vote in elections. Whoever is elected to the Board of Directors can have an important influence on the long-term health of the OTW’s projects, and we want our members to have a say in that.

For those who might be interested in the number of votes each candidate received, please note that our election process is designed to elect an equal cohort of Board members in order to allow them to work well together, so we do not release that information. As a general rule, we also won’t disclose which of our unsuccessful candidates received the fewest votes, since we don’t want to discourage them from running again in the future when circumstances and member interest might be different. However, as there were only 4 candidates this year, with two elected and one appointed, revealing that information is unavoidable.

Once again, a big thank you to everyone who participated at every stage of the election! We hope to see you at the virtual polls again next year.