In the committee nominations thread (here) "Friendly Flyer" said the following :
Started the thread here rather than allow that one to go off topic.Quite a few of us (me included) can't vote.
We hadn't joined at the time the poll was started and are thus blocked.
Is it possible for an admin to unlock polls while these important votes take place?
regards,
Colin
Sorry Colin, this is a deliberate policy and was done to prevent people signing up additional and spurious memberships simply for the purpose of having multiple votes in the elections.
I know that there is a downside to this, in as much as it prevents upright and honest voters such as yourself from voting.
It's a bit of a difficult situation. We knew that there would be a number of fake sign-ups (we have already caught quite a few). One way to prevent this happening would be to stop new members signing up during the poll process, but that would simply reject members.
An alternative was to just inhibit voting by new members for a while.
This is one reason why we had such a long period before we started the polls, we had to give members ample time to join (not having a dig at you or anybody else).
Now I just know that someone is going to come back and say "No that is not fair because . . . " . Well, sorry, but we know we will be wrong with someone, no matter what we did, it's a case of best endeavours. We just do the best we can.