Do I need to be a member? I can't find directly why becoming a member is needed or why should one be a member. What is a member, rather than an registered account here at MO?

Actually 1 simple question: What does this mean? :P

There is absolutely no 'must' to be a member of Maemo e.V.
Membership is absolutely on your own decision.

Do not have the links at hand, but search for bylaws of Maemo e. V.
good starting point: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=93476

normal garage account (not tmo) will be passive member
registered people will be regular member

It is planned like that, yes. Sounds like this means a problem for some. If so, please elaborate.

Not needed really, we may as well decide to use the voting engine.
BUT it was the assumption that
1) the number of members wouldn't be really high
2) the number of board candidates needed (3) will be hardly met.
3) board candidates are expected to be reelected unless they really mess up

The last point obviously needs some clarification:
First, we need to distinguish between representative and regular board members:
Representative board members are those that need to sign at court and that are authorized to fully represent the association. They need to be EU citicens or residents.
Regular board members may add up to the representative ones. They don't need to register at court and no restrictions apply to their nationality or residence.
In our case, MC eV board is designed to constist of at least 3 representative board members, a chair and two Deputy Directors. Any two of these three Board members together are authorized to fully represent the association (4 eye principle). So while all three have access to the bank account, only two together can take action.

This means that every change of the 3 representative board members needs to be filed to court.
Much more problematic is getting new people from various (EU) countrys to have access to the bank account. This has been an issue for HiFo eversince.
You see, a high fluctuation rate in board positions is not exactly desirable and also not very common in similar associations.

The maemo voting engine is designed for Council elections and utilizes the single transferable vote (STV) voting system which designed to achieve proportional representation through ranked voting in multi-seat constituencies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote
This is not what's needed for Board. We thought it would be better to put it like this:
Vote for candidate A (Yes/No/abstention), vote for candidate B (Yes/No/abstention) and so on.
Those with a majority of Yes-votes get in, those with a majority of No-votes are out. Simple as that.
In order to hold elections this way, but anonimously, maybe we can establish a second voting engine that works like this for Board elections.

Could you please explain in more detail how IRC voting will work? Will voters list all of their candidates on IRC at once (which would mean manual calculation) or does "hands up" mean it will it be one round at a time? If it is one round at a time, must all voters join the IRC channel at a specific time and stay for the duration of all rounds? Either way, it sounds like it could cause more problems than setting up an election with the existing voting system.

I always assumed that the exisitng system was automated. What's so complicated about it that makes setting it up a problem and why can't it be automated?

Bylaws § 9 General Assembly:

The new membership requirement and new voting system make it far too cumbersome for the ordinary person to bother voting in my opinion. I'll vote in the coming election but after that I'm out.

Fortunately, the new membership requirement and the new voting system are only for the Board.

Still, it would be advisable to find an "easier" voting system. Which would not require for all voters to be awake and present during specific hour(s) of election. The advantage of Council-like voting-through-website is that everybody chooses the time for voting by himself-herself within specified election-window (several days?).

Best wishes.
http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_Coun...ection_Q4_2014

That's true, but what concerns me is that quite a few have previously spoken out about getting rid of the council and merging it with the board e.V. and I was under the impression that this is the direction it's heading.

Not at all, if anything, Council could be merged with the General Meeting!

Country as country of residence or as country of citizenship?