Subj : Parliamentary rule To : Angus From : Daemon Date : Tue Sep 13 2005 11:16 am About your voting thing... I think I'll abstain from specifically listing all the committees I've belonged to or currently belong to, purely because the maturity level of the occasional DoveNET visitor could make it an unwise choice, but I'd be happy to email you a list, if you're interested. Suffice it to say, I've held multiple positions politically, with the short list being pretty much every committee/assembly position locally up to and including Chair in several different party structures, general assembly and executive comittees in the county and state, the NYS Supreme Court Judicial Convention (yearly mechanism for placing candidates for Supreme Court on the ballot in the state), and a State-Sanctioned Municipal Board's executive committee. So I've got a pretty fair amount of experience with parliamentary rule in general; enough to be recognized as an authority on it regionally, though I personally feel I fall short of my own reputation. *shrug* Okay. Generally speaking, the committees I've belonged in have either an appointment mechanism for "joining" or rigidly-defined guidelines mandated by election law for achieving measures of control according to verified support of the membership. Specifically, every single one has followed Roberts Rules of Order, Revised (if it didn't already, I made it so as a priority upon joining in every case). This automatically presumes a basic definition of quorum for every action of the group, a litmus test to be applied before any additional standards are employed in a voting mechanism. The situation you describe is a familiar one to me, as it's a pretty standard practice for rivals, both internal and external, to attempt to seize control of the administration or treasury of a committee by redefinition of the rules (so I tend to usually chair Rules Sub-Committees), usually watering them down to make it easier to assume the control of the membership with less membership actually involved in sanctioning the change. Quorum, traditionally, is usually 50% of the membership, rounded-up to the nearest whole number, and most votes for action on a question is determined (except under special circumstances) with a simple majority of voice vote. Now, the 50%, simple majority standard is kind of an arbitrary, trial-and- error established, value/standard that creates a reasonable balance between internal resistance to change and external influence to dynamic response. In your case, where the intention is to preserve the internal resistance to change above and beyond external considerations, it's VERY reasonable to have a 2/3 standard, especially in regards to membership acceptance. Here's a related anecdote that might be relevent in consideration, particularly in regards to abstentions. My first effort in that Municipal Board was to swing the officers' election away from the existing Chair/Co-Chair to a replacement of both. I'll simplify the numbers... Say the committee had been comprosed of 10 people. Quorum for the Board is 50% as above, and there's an additional stipulation that 50% of the total membership must act on a given question in order for it to be valid. So, with 6 people present, there were enough to call the meeting to order (quorum was met), but the question of the election of Chair became a problem. The Chair, by charter, only votes in the event of a tie, and 2 people abstained, making the resulting vote tally 2:1 (pathetically low for an executive effort, frankly), in favor of replacing the chair. Now... Even though I supported (quietly spear-headed, actually) the replacement, by basic definition of the rules, the vote was not valid and I challenged it, ending-up in a 9-day fight with our own lawyer about the definitions of various one-syllable words and grade-school mathematics. About 12-hours before the charter-defined time alloted to provide for a re-election, he finally capitulated and the Secretary offically sent-out notifications for a re-vote. The reason I'd fought the results I'd sought to achieve, was because it brought the question of abstentions and their effective definition into the spotlight, and that's ultimately the part of the argument I won my position on. (BTW... The re-vote was 100% in attendance and participating, and the replacement of Chair was an easy victory. Oh... And, no, I wasn't seeking the position and declined the nomination. It ended-up being a great compromise of competing factions, actually, that's worked great for 2 years now.) Anyway, an abstention is like a time-out. In abstaining from a vote on any question, a person's pretty much saying "I'm not here right now in a capacity relevent to the question on the table". As such, the abstainer voluntarily removes himself from being counted towards meeting the requirements for the vote. The lawyer's position was that once a person was counted towards quorum, they carried that validity with them through the agenda. Not so. A meeting organized along parliamentary rule is a SERIES of tests for adherence to the rules. Every action is built simultaneously upon the validity of the action before as well as the action itself. As such, though we had enough Board members in the room to conduct business, unless those members were actively conducting business their presence was irrelevent. The question of testing quorum for calling the meeting to order had been resolved, and the agenda directed the course towards other business, but when 2 members decided to abstain from voting on the question of Chair, less than the 50% membership requirement for validating an action were countable. Though it could proceed because quorum had been met and the agenda followed according to Roberts Rules, it failed its own litmus test on top of the general action litmus test, because a meeting isn't one fluid thing - it's one question/action at a time in a pre-agreed upon order, all of which must adhere on its own merits to all standards of validity without "borrowing" validity from previously-tested actions; they're not related in that way. So when the 2 members abstained, watering-down greatly the cohesive strength of the body of the committee, and with the Chair already not counting as a valid participant, there were only 3 members of the board at hand to apply towards testing for a valid vote. Like I said - grade-school math, but I had a hell of a time getting the lawyer to recognize that there was a significant difference between 30% and 50%. I actually invited him to seek the opinion of the State Attorney General's office, but time was an issue and he just consulted with (a lot of) local and regional colleagues until he finally gave up looking for one that agreed with him. Bottom line, though, is that an abstention flat-out shouldn't count towards meeting a voting requirement. They are neither presumed to be a Yes vore or a NO vote; they're not a relevent presence, voluntarily. (I also want to take a second and wonder aloud here what the point of abstaining from a secret ballot over membership of a club is in the first place. There are various legal reasons for this to occur in a political organization - conflicts of interests, etc - but I don't get the impression your group's political?) In summary, my opinion here is that you should seek to preserve and even strengthen your current requirement by clarification of the rules by which you preserve the integrity of whatever cause you organize around. Frankly, I could only really support a watering-down of such standards if it was recognized by the body of the group that what the club stands for is less than it was before. Otherwise, you run the very big risk of making it so by your own weakened charter. --- þ Synchronet þ Necropolis - necropolisbbs.darktech.org .