Teasel and I are working on a new system (well, he's working and I'm just suggesting) and we hope to have a more realistic set-up in place soon, where new members will automatically be made voting members after a given period. We should have some news about this soon.
The delay in doing this is due to discussion about the finer points, not due to actually writing and implementing the system. The reason the existing system was instigated was to try to avoid sock puppet sign-ups prior to an election, and we still want to avoid that. We also believe that there's a lot of dead wood amongst the existing membership list, and we'd like to weed that out automatically too. By dead wood I mean people who've signed up, but then never gone caching and are no longer interested, and people from other countries who've signed up just to make a one-off post in the forums, and so on.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. (Dylan Thomas)