janetdoe

Right, but none of the official promotion and messaging tells anyone why TalkBoard is important or lets people know what issues TalkBoard has the potential to impact. I ignored the election for homecoming queen when I was in high school because it was irrelevant to me, (even though there were countless signs and people canvassing the halls, etc) and I ignored TalkBoard elections for several years because I had no idea why I should care.

It seems to me that the inability to do issue advocacy during the election 'season' is a huge barrier to making TalkBoard relevant and meaningful to people who (like Sharon said) only visit the hotel or airline or MR Deals forum. It's purposely trying to make TalkBoard a popularity contest rather than a real election with debate of issues. How meaningful would the presidential debates be if they were only allowed to be aired on HBO, or more accurately, on the free community access cable channel that no one ever watches?

I am suggesting that the ONE THING that you could do to get people interested in the elections is to allow bumps of threads that are related to current election issues, and allow people to point out that this issue could be voted on by TalkBoard. Everything else you're doing is not working, you say yourself you haven't allowed issue advocacy on main threads for years, and the results show. Last year some tiny tiny fraction of members voted. No one votes because they are never informed/reminded of the election in a context they care about.

And frankly, if one candidate is willing to go out and advocate/campaign in individual forums and another isn't, I don't really care how fair it is. I want the candidates who have the time and the passion to dedicate themselves to issues. I really have no interest in monitoring or ensuring 'ease and convenience of campaigning'. <shrug>