Election Ethics

In light of the article on the ARRL website posted today, I thought I would talk a little bit about my election strategy and how that fits with the ethics rules.

I really appreciate the election rules that the ARRL has adopted. They seem to be particularly designed to keep incumbents from having an edge over challengers. That is a hard thing for a board to do, and I appreciate the emphasis on the organization above what might be the personal goals of an individual director or vice-director.

My own campaigning so far has been limited to this website, some personal communications with local hams (sometimes over the air, discreetly), and a very small email campaign. I was
hoping to get to some more of the ham club meetings between Cheyenne and Denver to personally introduce myself, but not much of that has happened.

At one time I thought it would be pretty easy to download the FCC database of all amateur radio licensees, do a query for the ones in this division (by state), then send an email for each one to callsign@arrl.net. But there are two problems with that idea. The first problem is that it would be a mail-spam operation. I hate spam email. So that would be pretty hypocritical of me to spam all of the ARRL members in the division, and probably counterproductive. The second problem is that it would be using the arrl.net forwarding facility. One of the rules of the election is that ARRL organizational facilities and assets cannot be used for campaigning purposes.

Well, that does present a problem! A lot of ARRL members use the arrl.net email forwarding facility. Am I prohibited from sending any email to an arrl.net address that could be construed as campaign material? I think some clarification is needed in that area! I decided that I would draw the line by not doing a fishing expedition for email addresses on the arrl.net service. That would probably cause somebody, somewhere to have to intervene and try to clean up a mess (since there would be more bounced messages than good ones it would look like a spam attack or denial of service attack or something). But real addresses that were known to me that happened to be on the arrl.net service I would go ahead and use. My rationale is that such messages would not be a burden on the facility, would require no person's intervention and not incur some financial obligation to the organization.

I did decide to send out email. What I did is I looked up the section pages for Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah on the ARRL website. I took email addresses directly from those web pages and sent a very short email to those people. I reminded them of the upcoming election and told them I was running and that I had a website they could check out (this blog).
I did a similar thing with the ARRL affiliated club web search facility. I sent an email to the club contacts listed for clubs in these four states. Many of those addresses used the arrl.net facility.

The issue in the recent article seems to be openness and truthfulness. I've been trying really hard to stick to that. If I can't be truthful during the election than I don't think it will be any easier to do so when/if I get a position of responsibility.

It's not life-or-death to win this election. It's a volunteer position. I think it is desirable because I would like to meet more hams and participate in shaping the policies and direction of the ARRL. I think I have something to contribute in that area. But my opponent in the election is a capable person and it won't be a terrible thing if he gets elected instead of me. The attitude I'm supposed to have is one of service. If you'd rather have his service than mine then part of my service is to make that happen as smoothly and happily as possible.