As you're aware, the Convention Oversight Committee is finishing a project of collecting electronic debate qualification tokens from our delegates. We sent the invitations out on Tuesday morning, and then I spent most of the next day and a half communicating with people who said they didn't receive it, determining whether there was a problem I could fix, and resolving those. The outcome is important, and I wanted to help every delegate participate if they wanted to. There were email addresses that bounced, family members sharing a single email address, email addresses who had previously opted out of receiving emails from the Survey Monkey service we used, email addresses which had at some prior date bounced when Survey Monkey tried to email them so the system refused to attempt to send to that address again, people watching the wrong email account, mail providers which put the emails not just in the spam folder but in some cases in the trash folder, etc. I made a list of everyone who contacted me, tracked my notes for each person, marking who was fixed and who was still pending resolution. In the end, there were a handful of delegates that it was just impossible to get the emails to -- the internet monster ate it, one whose email provider just automatically opts-out on behalf of the user, the bounce history between the sender/receiver, etc. For that handful of delegates the only way I found for them to participate was for them to email their choices to me, and I'm going to manually add those records to the results file before the totals are calculated. Do you know what the MOST COMMON solution to the problem was when someone said they didn't receive the invite? Just waiting 24 hours. John Doe didn't receive it, checked spam, checked trash, contacted me, I research, he's looking in the right email account...wait overnight and suddenly the message popped out of the internet and into his inbox. What's my point? Just sending an email to 1046 delegates isn't the end of the story. It took a very long time and a lot of work to make sure that all who wanted to could participate in this electronic "vote." If we imagine that during the online event this weekend, an admin can hit a button and within a short period of time all delegates present in Zoom will suddenly and reliably receive a mass email and be able to respond...we're fooling ourselves. Some delegates didn't get the debate token email for a full day; some never did. This weekend we're going to encounter similar problems distributing nominating tokens, with what I think is planned for checking quorum, etc. I don't know how each state is conducting their election votes, but if they're a larger state using email voting systems, guess what... In a real convention, we would never conduct a vote in which some delegates present in the hall didn't get ballots. This weekend, if in the interest of time, we don't wait for all participants to receive whatever is being sent out, and we just forge ahead anyway after a relatively short time window thinking "Oh well, too bad! Most of us got it," then we're depriving some participants of their rights. Sure, the vast majority may get theirs quickly, but if you're the one who doesn't, you're going to be very upset, and rightly so. These sorts of bulk email delivery problems are things that hide in the background of the internet, things that only IT people have to think about. The way we have chosen to proceed this weekend is likely going to bring those IT realities to the forefront. -Alicia