ALA election polls to open on March 15

Contact: Mark Gould


Director, PIO


312-280-5042


mgould@ala.org

For Immediate Release


March 7, 2006

ALA election polls to open on March 15

CHICAGO
– The polls will open on March 15 for the 2006 American Library Association (ALA) election. All current ALA members as of January 31, 2006, are eligible to vote. Members must submit their ballots by April 24, 2006, at 11:59 p.m. CST.

For 2006 elections, all Web voters will receive ballots between March 15 and March 17, 2006, in a 48-hour email blast. This will ensure that voters have more time to cast their ballots. Members without email addresses, or who have email addresses that bounce, will receive a paper ballot package. Paper ballots also will be sent to members in good standing who requested them prior to March 3, 2006.

Paper ballot packages will be mailed between March 15 and March 22, 2006. International paper ballot packages will be mailed between March 13 and March 14, 2006.

ALA also has a new election domain name (
https://www.alavote.org), allowing the email “From” line to be:
2006election@alavote.org. This change will make it less likely that any ballots will be identified incorrectly as spam.

Building on the association's experience with the 2005 electronic election, a number of changes made last year will continue with the 2006 election process and ballot. The 2006 election will be ALA's third online accessible election. The 2006 ballot meets all applicable W3C accessibility standards and can be read by common screen readers for the disabled. This allows ALA's visually impaired members to navigate Web sites by converting text and other visual symbols to audible speech.

This election, council candidate biographies will be available in HTML format for members to review and print before entering the ballot package. A link to these will be provided on the ALA Website (
www.ala.org).