2,180 Bitcoin Foundation Members Barred from Voting

Only 20% of the potential voters are allowed to take part in the current board member election for the Bitcoin Foundation. A new rule requiring voters to ‘activate’ their account was missed by up to 2,182 members, leading to their ineligibility to vote.
The change in The Bitcoin Foundation‘s voting by-laws came about in an attempt to bypass an existing clause, which specifies that quorum in elections would only be reached when 50 % of those able to vote participated.
By adding a new requirement that voters intending to take part in the board election must ‘activate’ their accounts prior to the poll, the Foundation was trying to solve the problem that ‘[i]nactive members make achieving quorum difficult for electing board members.’ The only members who would count in the quorum total would be those actively participating in the run-up to the election.
In a Github post discussing the changes, the board describes their problem in the following terms:
‘Currently, inactive members essentially function as members who wish all matters submitted to membership vote to fail to achieve quorum and no candidate to be successful. While such wishes must be a choice each member is free to choose, it should not be the default state assigned if no action by a member is taken.’

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2015-02-17.