National Collectives Electoral Rules (OUTDATED, 2017)

Two agreed rules apply to the elections for the National Collectives, as well as to the compilation of the vote’s results.

Rule 1: Candidates select which category they wish to run under (e.g. Communications, Policy, etc.) and cannot be elected to some other category, independently of how many votes they receive relative to candidates standing for other categories.

Rule 2: Gender equality (50%-50%) is implemented by two sub-rules:

• 1. Voters cannot cast their votes (over all categories) for more candidates of one gender than half the positions on the NC. E.g. If there are 16 seats on a NC, one cannot vote for more than 8 men (or 8 women).
  2. In the final count, to ensure gender equality (50%-50%), candidates of each gender are ranked in terms of how many votes they received and the top N/2 women and top N/2 men are marked as elected – where N is the number of places on the National Collective. Then they are allocated to the categories they competed in.

Explanatory Note:

The rationale behind 2(i)

From the experience of gender equality implementation in other organisations (internationally), it is clear that if only sub-rule 2(ii) were to be applied, without 2(i), some women might have been elected over men with many fewer votes than those men. To prevent this, DiEM25 introduces 2(i) – a rule that demands of all of us to divide our votes equally between men and women.

The rationale behind 2(ii)

However, the danger with 2(i) is that, if there are many more men than women candidates/voters, the minimum votes for the women [that 2(i) generates) will be concentrated on the (relatively fewer women) – and this may result in the opposite gender imbalance (with women over-represented on the NC). To balance this bias out, DiEM25 introduced 2(ii).

Call for consultation on our electoral system

At DiEM25 we learn and we improve our internal democratic processes as we proceed. To this effect, we call upon members to send us their views, even objections, regarding the electoral system presented above.