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"Super" majority


Guest Chuck Adkins

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Guest Chuck Adkins

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I belong to an organization which is currently changing its By Laws. A paragraph included is: "3) A super majority of three-fourths (3/4) of all members eligible
to vote is required to remove an elected officer.". Nowhere in Robert Rules of Order (Roberts Rules of Order Now Revised) to I find any mention of a super majority. RRONR states a 2/3s vote is required to remove an individual from office. Can you clarify?

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I would be VERY concerned about a rule worded the way that one is. I interpret that provision as requiring the vote of three fourths of the ENTIRE MEMBERSHIP. That can be awfully hard to obtain. That rule means that if you have 100 members, you must have 75 yes votes to remove an officer, not just 3/4 of those present and voting. 

That's an almost impossible requirement in most organizations. 

Are you sure that's what you want? Can you even get 75 percent of your members to go to a meeting?

Maybe others view the rule as harmless, but I view it as perhaps impossible to obtain.

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9 minutes ago, Richard Brown said:

Maybe others view the rule as harmless, but I view it as perhaps impossible to obtain.

Well, all I said was it's okay to differ from RONR.  It's hard for me to say if it's harmless without knowing more about the organization.  On the other hand, you bring up something I hadn't noticed originally: the rule doesn't exactly say "entire membership."  I agree with your reading, but I think it's possible the organization didn't mean that and doesn't want that, in which case they certainly should change the language.

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I would say that, in a society that adopted RONR, the society would either have to define the type of majority in text, or use the RONR definition for the particular term.  For example, if the bylaws use the words "good majority," and didn't define it in text, it would mean "majority" in RONR.  If they used, "the majority of the members present," that would mean what RONR defines as that.

 

A plurality is not necessarily a majority, so I doubt if "simple majority" would mean "plurality," unless the bylaws went on to describe it as such. 

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