Voting in the the 2009 WGA Board of Directors election has begun! Click here to go to the election page and cast your votes for your favorite candidates. WGA members may vote for up to 5 of the candidates before voting closes on Sunday, February 8th at 11:59pm.

Here are some general notes about this phase of the Board of Directors election process.

• Since there are 5 open Board positions, members may vote for up to 5 of the candidates.
• If you try to vote for more than 5 candidates, all your votes will be thrown out and you’ll be given a chance to vote again.
• Once you vote, you cannot vote again. Therefore, if you vote for fewer than 5 candidates, you can’t come back and vote for more. Also, you can’t change your votes (so get them right the first time!).
• Voting will end at precisely 11:59pm on Sunday, February 8, 2009.
• The 5 candidates with the highest vote totals at the end of voting will fill the open Board positions.

If you have any general questions about this phase of the election process, feel free to post them in the Candidates Corner 2009 forum. If you experience technical problems with the voting system or trouble with your WGA member account, you can contact Jeremy (jvechinski).

Also, we take the Board elections seriously and will be watching for fraudulent votes. Here is a list of some of the things that we do to prevent election/voting fraud and ensure a fair election:

• Only WGA members (not WGA friends) can vote in the election, and they can only vote once (enforced by the voting system).
• Only 3 people can view the votes cast. This year it is Jeremy (jvechinski), Brian (Buy_The_Tie), and Becky (greyhounder). They are “impartial observers.”
• While we still allow people to sign up as WGA members during the election, any votes cast by these new members are carefully scrutinized. In the past, we’ve actually contacted several new members by email to verify their votes.
• When a vote is cast, an email message is sent to a special, secure email account. In the event of an unexpected problem with the WGA web server, these email votes could be used as a backup and would be manually tallied.
• Before the final results are released, all the votes will be audited.