Summary

  • Hernán Moguilevsky was one of six authors of LAC-2022-4, implemented in December 2022. It requires a PDP chair candidate to have spent 12 months on LACNIC's public Policy List before the election announcement; a voter needs six.
  • LACNIC's 2026 co-chair election notice applied the six-month voter rule to people subscribed by 17 September 2025 at 18:00 UTC. The policy forum remained open to anyone; the electoral roll had a clock.

At LACNIC, a person can walk into the Public Policy Forum, argue over an address policy and still be too new to vote for the people who moderate that argument. It sounds like a contradiction until the two jobs are separated. Discussion is open. Choosing a chair is an election with an eligibility list. Hernán Moguilevsky helped write the line between them.

His name appears with five other authors on LAC-2022-4, the 2022 proposal to revise the PDP chair election. The old text let anyone subscribed to the Policy List vote. The adopted text demanded six months of subscription before the election announcement. A would-be chair needed a full year on the list, plus a LACNIC member contact's nomination or member-contact status. The difference is deliberate: the person running a policy debate must have a longer visible history than the person choosing that moderator.

The rule also moved authority away from the meeting-room moment. Electronic voting was to take place before the first Public Policy Forum of the year; the winner would be announced there and take office after the forum closed. The earlier procedure had asked the room to ratify an electronic result after hearing objections. Under the new text, election appeals go to LACNIC's Board, with a four-week decision window and a duty to explain any extension on the Policy List. A microphone can still challenge policy. It no longer doubles as the final ballot referee.

A few smaller lines do much of the work. LACNIC Board members, Electoral Commission members and staff cannot run for PDP chair. The Electoral Commission decides other incompatibilities. Campaigning on the Policy List is forbidden. The chairs remain unpaid volunteers on staggered two-year terms, with one seat due for renewal each year. Those provisions put the list, the commission and the Board in different jobs rather than asking one chair to police their own succession.

The policy record dates ratification to 4 December 2022 and implementation to 19 December. The current PDP text still carries both clocks. More tellingly, the 2026 election notice converted the six-month rule into a date: only people subscribed by 17 September 2025 at 18:00 UTC could vote. The notice also excluded LACNIC staff from voting and described an anonymous electronic ballot beginning on 13 April 2026. That is the point where a policy paragraph became an electoral boundary people could test against their own subscription date.

No public tally in these records shows how many people the cutoff kept out. A dated count of eligible and excluded subscribers, together with the appeals record, would show its actual reach. The written mechanism is clear without that tally: the forum welcomes a new voice immediately; the ballot makes it wait six months; the chair's chair makes it wait a year. Moguilevsky and his coauthors made time itself an election official.