Voting for the third seat on the board of ICANN was suspended on Friday due to voting irregularities, apparently caused by a technical problem. Voting took place all last week within ICANN’s domain name supporting organization (DNSO), which gets to nominate three board members to the new swollen 18-member ICANN board. The other two supporting organizations will also be choosing three seats soon.
One of the 19-strong ‘electorate’ which make up the names council (NC), which runs the DNSO, appeared to cast a vote for an American candidate, Karl Auerbach. However, that NC member then said that the vote was supposed to be for Nii Quaynor, the only African nominee in the whole process. The other two seats have gone to a Mexican and a Spaniard, respectively, so due to ICANN’s geographic diversity requirements, Latin America and Europe’s candidates were removed for the final seat.
Reports suggest that if the vote had gone to Quaynor, then it would leave former US Congressman Rick White alone with the lowest number of votes and he would have been eliminated from the next round. Voting keeps going until one candidate wins a majority of the votes, ie. 10. The voting will apparently be completed today, Monday and no further details were available at press time.
