How user-friendly is IEEE Electronic Balloting?

Dennis Holstein, Publisher
June 2001

IEEE P1525 is an approved development project (approved on March 19, 1998) sponsored by the Substations Committee. C2TF4 is responsible for developing the standard. C2TF4 conducts their meeting and work sessions at the PES Winter and Summer Power meetings, the annual Substations Committee meeting, and jointly with the Power Systems Relaying Committee (PSRC) in September of each year. Clearly stated in the approved project is the purpose and scope for P1525. An overview of P1525 and some of the controversy surrounding its development was described in my January 2001 newsletter. Click here to read that that newsletter.

C2TF4 completed a draft for ballot in November 2001. C2TF4 expected the IEEE Standards Association (SA) to form a balloting group and procedure with the ballot in a normal manner. Well guess what folks, the "normal" manner of this process is not very well understood at all. The devil is in the details, but let me give you a brief overview of the problem.

Formation of a balloting group

Initiating the formation of a balloting group is the responsibility of the sponsoring committee (through the standards coordinator), in this case the Substations Committee. They decide which committees should be included in the balloting group.

	The sponsoring committee may select to ballot only within their committee, or they may include other committees. For P1525 the intent was to include all committees listed on the PAR for coordination. Committees listed on the PAR for coordination also expected to be included in the invitation to join the balloting group.
	The first mistake that we made was to assume that SA would issue invitations to all the committees listed on the PAR; e.g., PSRC, PSCC, SCC36, IEC US Tag for TC57, etc. Logical thought, but not true! SA must be told which committees to invite, they do not automatically take these from the PAR.

It seems to me that this process could easily be fixed. The standards coordinator should be able to tell SA to invite all committees listed on the PAR to join the balloting group, and to add others explicitly.

Invitation to ballot

After the balloting group has been formed, SA sends a list of of eligible and non-eligible members to the standards coordinator and working group (task force) chairman. If the list is balanced and includes those members expected to ballot, the working group chairman notifies the standards coordinator that the list is acceptable, and the standards coordinator tells the SA to proceed with the ballot.

	This procedure seems straightforward, and the list was reviewed. Guess what, several people listed as non-eligible were were surprised about their status. The only requirement for eligibility is that the individual be a member of the Standards Association. The fee for becoming a member is very modest - $10/year.
	To become a member of SA their is a box on the annual dues form that must be checked, and the additional $10 is added to the total. Seems simple enough, I checked the box and didn't give it a second thought. However guess what, the life members of IEEE don't have the same annual renewal notification and many are not members of the SA. Several life members showed up on the non-eligible list because they did not pay the $10 SA fee.
	Finally, it became clear that some members who were eligible to vote had not updated their Email address in the IEEE database. When they were sent an invitation to ballot a negative response was returned by their old Email service provider. Of course SA has no way to know their new Email address, and they did not receive an invitation to ballot.

Every member must take personal responsibility to make sure their Email address at IEEE is up-to-date and correct. The best approach is to use an IEEE alias for all correspondence with IEEE organizations. Then when your Email address changes, you only have to update the IEEE alias.

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Last modified: Sunday August 01, 2004 .