This document describes the procedures for IEEE 802.16 Working Group Letter Ballot of Draft Standards. The following guidelines, from the IEEE 802 Operating Rules, apply:
The decision to submit a draft standard or a revised standard to the Sponsor Ballot Group must be ratified by a letter ballot. Other matters may also be decided by a letter ballot at the discretion of the Working Group Chair. The Working Group Chair may vote in letter ballots. The letter ballot response time must be at least forty days from the time of "sending" postmark to the postmark of the returned ballot.
The ballot shall contains three choices:
- Approve. (May attach non-binding comments.)
- Do Not Approve. (Must attach specific comments on what must be done to the draft to change the vote to "Approve".)
- Abstain. (Must include reasons for abstention.)
To forward a draft standard or a revised standard to the Executive Committee for approval for Sponsor Ballot Group voting, a letter ballot (or confirmation letter ballot) must be done first within the Working Group. A 75 percent approval of the Working Group confirmation letter ballot is necessary with at least 50 percent of the members voting. The 75 percent figure is computed only from the "Approve" and "Do Not Approve" votes. Subsequent confirmation ballots to the Sponsor Ballot Group do not require Executive Committee approval.
The Working Group Chair determines if and how negative votes in an otherwise affirmative letter ballot are to be resolved. Normally, the Working Group meets to resolve the negatives or assigns the task to a ballot resolution group.
There is a recirculation requirement. For guidance on the recirculation process see Section 5.4.3.2 Resolution of comments, objections, and negative votes in the IEEE Standards Operating Manual.
Submission of a draft standard or a revised standard to the Executive Committee must be accompanied by any outstanding negative votes and a statement of why these unresolved negative votes could not be resolved.
In order that the comments be readily collected by the editorial team for efficient processing (often of hundreds of comments on a single document), the comments must be submitted following a specific procedure which will be explained in the Letter Ballot announcement. Submissions that do not follow the procedure should be rejected so as not to delay the comment resolution process. The editor should notify the submitter of the rejection.
If it is necessary to support comments with details that cannot be accommodated in the text-based format, then the voter should contribute a document for publication on the IEEE 802.16 web site using the current 802.16 Document Submission Template. Such contributions should be submitted to the document Editor and to the Working Group Chair. They should be submitted at least five days before the close of the ballot to provide time for the document to be numbered and posted. The ballot comment may then refer specifically to the posted document by number.
The ballot results shall be compiled into a database. Prior to comment resolution, the Editor shall document the ballot results and the comments. The results shall be posted to 802.16's password-protected web area.
Following IEEE guidelines, the document under Working Group Letter Ballot is considered a Draft Standard. IEEE requires that Draft Standards carry the IEEE copyright notice and be restricted in distribution. As a result, Draft Standards will be posted to the 802.16 password-protected web site for access by 802.16 Members and Observers only.
The IEEE 802.16 Membership Procedures, which are in accordance with the 802 Rules, specify that "Working Group Membership shall be lost if two consecutive, or two of any three consecutive, Working Group letter ballots are not returned or are returned with an abstention other than for 'lack of technical expertise'."