This is great fun! Several days ago, just to cheer me up (one of my little puppies has been ill — hopefully not with that dread full sickness you all have over there), I signed both petitions too and they were validated despite the fact I have not stepped on your side of the pond in over a decade, am a citizen of Great Briton, and have never joined nor provided funds to the LPUS.

Here at the UKLP for any voting done outside of a meeting, we have a system in place that requires you to use your UKLP provided identification number along with a pin number to participate in a secured on line system. I guess for once we here are ahead of you technology wise because as I proved, anyone can vote and be counted.

Thus, your system is highly flawed and that means none of the votes should count.

So thanks for the good cheer, I look forward to participating in USLP votes in the future!

Geoffrey

http://knappster.blogspot.com/2009/04/speechifying-r-lee-wrights-in-knoxville.html

Sorry, I meant “validated,” not “invalidated.”

I hadn’t sent you and Mike individual “did you mean to sign?” emails, because I already KNEW you meant to sign, because we had discussed the petition before it even went up. So your signatures were reasonably “pre-validated.”

In other news:

While the largest number of delegates credentialed at the 2008 convention (as reported in LNC minuts) was 652, that was for a single session.

My understanding is that the consensus of the Judicial Committee is that as many as “about 850″ individual delegates may have been credentialed at one point or another.

This means that instead of 66 valid delegate signatures, the burden for the appeal is 86 delegate signatures.

At present, I’m confident that the petition has received valid, authentic endorsements from 101 delegates, but I’m still working on final verification and authentication. I intend to formally submit the appeal in the next 24-48 hours.

The petition remains available for new signatures, but because most of the recent signatures seem to be spurious, I’ve changed the petition to require approval for signatures. Henceforth, I will verify/authenticate BEFORE a new signature is appended to the list.

Best regards,
Tom Knapp

Correction: Aaron Starr, Bill Redpath and Bob Sullentrup appear to have signed the delegate petition.

I’ve sent an email to each of them, at their email addresses listed on the lp.org page, asking them to confirm or deny the authenticity of those signatures. Unless they confirm the authenticity within about 24 hours, I’ll delete the signatures.

The number of valid signatures required for the delegate appeal is 66. My personal count for “certainly or nearly certainly authentic” signatures so far is in excess of 80. I’ll continue to try to verify additional signatures, but I believe the petition will withstand scrutiny for validity.

Trust me, the spoof wasn’t me. If it were, it’d be a lot more verbose and kissing Lee’s boots in tearful apology to the point of nausea!

Besides, that could be construed as intitiating a fraud.