Category: 2019 Election News

Now that the 2019 election is over, we’re happy to share with you our voter turnout statistics!

For the 2019 Election, we had 9939 total eligible voters. Of those, 2234 voters cast a ballot, which represents 22.5% of the potential voters. We’re proud to say that our voter turnout is higher than that of last year, which had a turnout of 14.6%. We also saw an increase in the number of ballots cast, from 827 to 2234, which represents a 270% increase and gives us the highest turnout we’ve ever had!

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 3 candidates this year, 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.

The Elections Committee would like to thank all of our candidates for their hard work in this year’s election. With that, we are pleased to present the results of the 2019 Election.

The following candidates (in alphabetical order) have been officially elected to the Board of Directors.

• Kirsten Wright
• Rebecca Sentance

Board turnover will formally begin on October 1. We wish the new members of the Board well with their terms.

With that, the election season comes to a close. Thank you to everyone who got involved by spreading the word, asking the candidates questions, and, of course, voting! We look forward to seeing all of you again next year.

Edit: The election is running properly again. You can cast your ballot up until the deadline given in this post.

Due to a technical error, voting in the 2019 OTW Board Election has been temporarily suspended. We expect that the election will be re-opened for voters to submit their ballots about two hours from now. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. This post will be edited once voting has reopened.

To assist voters, we will extend the voting time an extra 2 hours, until 2am UTC on Tuesday, August 13. (What time is that for me?) Thank you for your patience!

The election has opened!

Every member who joined between July 1, 2018, and June 30, 2019, 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.

The election will run through August 12, 2019, 23:59 UTC; check this time zone converter to find out what time that will be for you.

Once you’ve voted, you can head over to Twitter and use the hashtag #OTWE19 to let us know!

If you used a Yahoo email address when you donated: On July 15, Yahoo purged accounts that had not been logged into within the past year. As a result, many ballots from the election that were sent to Yahoo emails bounced. If you signed up for membership with a Yahoo email address, please check that you can log into your Yahoo account and received a ballot. If you cannot log into your Yahoo account, go to the elections contact form and select “Is my membership current/Am I eligible to vote?” in order to submit an alternate email request. In the request, include your original Yahoo email address and the new one where you would like your ballot sent.

At this time, all eligible OTW members should have received an email linking to the voting instructions for 2019. 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 a 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, 2018, and June 30, 2019, inclusive of both dates.
• 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 the 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?”