AFS1970

Maybe I misunderstand the wording in the constitution, but why would there be a time when you would want to make a tie vote? I understand breaking a tie, but wouldn't making a tie just trigger the need to break a tie and thus give the president an undue amount of executive power? Are these the situations this constitution envisions? Scenario #1: 11 members voting, vote is 6 to 5, the president then votes to MAKE the tie 6 to 6, then votes to break the tie but votes with the side that originally had 5. Scenario #2: 10 members voting, the vote is 5 to 5, the president votes to BREAK the tie by voting with one side.

Each race had its own ballot, so there were not sections of ballots. I realize now that there should have been two spaced for write in candidates. As an example, what we had for one race was a ballot that looked like this (only using candidates initials). Candidate A.N. had already won and accepted a higher office. J.L. (I) M.D. (I) E.Y. A.N. R.O. A.S. Write In Abstain So, if I understand it correctly, no matter if a voter picked one or two candidates, we would just tally up the votes under each name and that would be the results. This is what we did. In the above ballot I came in third, so the first two won the two open positions. Someone voting for a single candidate would just mean that the total number of votes cast would not be 30 for 15 voters. Another question arises then, would the majority be calculated by the number of ballots returned or the number of votes cast?

A few months ago, my organization had elections. some members have raised issues with the way the election was conducted. I am fairly certain that none of these issues created continuing breaches, so raising points of order would not be correct at this point. I am asking a few questions here to hopefully make sure we don't have similar issues next year. Our secretary is not great with a computer, so under her watchful eye, I made the ballots for her, so at least one of the issues may have been my fault. To start with we had many contested races this year, which is unusual but due to some recent bylaw changes, which are in general a good thing. This led to lots of candidates, compared to last year where almost all officers ran unopposed. Some offices had single openings and others had two openings. On the ballots for the offices with multiple openings. They had the position title, then were marked "vote for any two" then listed all the names. The incumbents that were nominated for reelection were listed first then other candidates in seniority order. The order is not specified in our bylaws. Then there was a space to write in a candidate, this is the first year that we have had that space. Then there was a space to make a ballot as an abstention. Question: Should there be a written abstention, as an abstention is the act of not voting? Does writing it make it a vote and effect the majority? Some members only voted for one candidate, apparently enough that the President became worried that the voting rules were not clear. He announced that he was going to throw out the results and hold a new election. There was much spirited discussion, all chaotic, that convinced him to let the votes cast stand. The biggest point among those was that you could not prove that those members did not intend to only vote for one candidate. The president thought that members may not have understood they could vote for two candidates. Question: If a ballot says to vote for any two, is it allowable to vote for one? At some point during the tabulations for one office (I am not sure which one) one of the tellers (a non-voting member) told the president he wasn't following RONR about the results. The President replied to him that we don't follow Robert's Rules. This is incorrect, as our bylaws clearly establish RONR as the parliamentary authority. One of the duties of our president is to fairly and impartially enforce the bylaws. Question, depending on what that alleged breach was, is it possible that the election for that office become invalid? If so, does that invalidate all or part of the rest of the election? The teller who has told of this quote is clearly more concerned with the statement than whatever prompted it. When we got down to the last office, quite a few of the candidates were now no longer candidates, as they had won and accepted higher offices. The President (as is our custom) reminded the membership of the candidates that were on the ballot but had effectively withdrawn from the race. We were down to three candidates, out of six for two positions. Someone quietly and not heard by all asked the president to remind the members they could write in any eligible member, the reply as it has been relayed in the story was that the members should be smart enough to figure out the ballot on their own. Basically, the opposite of his opinion about previous offices. Our voting rules are in the bylaws, but I doubt most members have read them, and some of the rules that got brought up wither informally or after the fact were from RONR not our bylaws. Question: Should a general announcement be made about the voting rules before the election begins? Sorry for multiple questions in one long winded post, but so much of this is intertwined.

Not that I am any kind of legal expert, but it seems to me that the membership roll, while maintained by the secretary, is not part of the record books. The books have a listed content in RONR and the membership roll is not among that list. The list is not prefaced by any language that says including or not limited to, so a plain reading is that the list is limited. In my organization, there would be a loophole, in that part of our minutes is the meeting attendance, and the form we use is a sign in sheet, which is a membership list that we sign our names to next to our printed name. There is no contact information, but the list of names is there.

I fear we may have messed up by not catching a subtle wording difference when we revised our fire department bylaws. Our old Bylaws had the following wording: When we revised our bylaws, this had a requirement for calls added, and it was moved to a new article as follows: This wording is referenced in our requirements to run for office as follows, which is where the potential trouble comes up. This adds in a reference to the following: Sorry for the long list of quotes, but our issue now comes up with the difference between an expectation versus a requirement. Article 4, Section 3 says members are expected to meet quotas but then says that failing to attend the requisite number makes you subject to discipline. All the other sections refer to the quotas as required not expected, is there a difference? This is going to be a big issue because both our chief and our president are against the new bylaws and have said they can't figure out who has enough calls and drills due to poor record keeping. The chief said this only after trying to say he wasn't going to provide the records to follow this requirement. The President has indicated that he simply will not enforce these requirements (if that is what they are). This is leading to at least two and maybe more candidates that are probably ineligible for office being allowed to run. I expect several points of order to be raised the night of the elections. In discussions about how to deal with this, it was brought up that expecting someone to do something is not the same as requiring them to do something. If they are the same, then we will run into the problem with ineligible candidates. If they are different (and thus not as enforcible) it is likely that those candidates will be eligible to run after all.

So, I made the ballots for the secretary, because she is not great with a computer. I included a single write in, should I have actually included two? Since we have a curious tradition of including an option to abstain on the ballot, which I have never personally agreed with. Now, I realize that candidates need to get a majority of the votes cast but I suspect the President will accept a winner by plurality. If this is done, could this be appealed just as any ruling from the chair?

For Clarification, at some time before 2013 we had the position 1st Captain and the separate position of 2nd Captain. Going back to at least the 2013 bylaws the text read there will be two (2) Captains. However, for as long as anyone can remember we still nominated and elected the positions separately. Up until 2019 we had three positions 1st Lieutenant, 2nd Lieutenant and the oddly named Second 2nd Lieutenant. In 2019 those were combined by changing the language to mirror the captains by saying there will be three (3) Lieutenants. This is how we discovered that previous elections had been conducted wrong. This year's revision eliminated one lieutenant position so it now says there will be two (2) Lieutenants.

After our fire department's recent bylaws' revision, there are more candidates eligible for several positions compared to last year. However, this had led to more questions than answers and some factional battles. Two of the positions have multiple openings. We will be electing two Captains and two Lieutenants. Currently we have 6 candidates for Captain and 5 candidates for Lieutenant. Our bylaws only require vote by ballot. This has brought up two questions on how the election will work. First it has been asked if we each vote for one candidate, or do we vote for any two candidates? Years ago, these were separate positions, but they were combined at different times in previous revisions. Lieutenants were combined 2 years ago but Captains were combined sometime before 2013, although multiple presidents have run separate elections in apparent violations of the bylaws. Many of our members are used to voting for two candidates for two separate positions. The second question is a bit more bizarre and entirely dependent on the first answer. One candidate insists that since he can cast two votes, that he can vote for himself twice instead of voting for two separate candidates. He has said that in another fire department he is a member of he voted for himself 5 times for a similar position with 5 openings. He believes this guarantees him a victory and has said that RONR does not prohibit him from voting for the same person twice. This seems like something that shouldn't be allowed. There are definitely going to be growing pains this year, we are running into issues with who is actually eligible to run for various positions and how those rulings are backed up, but those will not really affect the above questions, other than possibly changing the number of candidates.

To start I am not even certain this is really an election, but that is what we call it in our order of business. When someone applies to our fire department, they are interviewed and as long as nothing negative comes up the board that interviews the will make the motion at the next meeting to admit them for membership. The custom, has always been for the President to read the application and ask for a motion. Somebody always makes the motion that the application takes it's usual course, followed by a voice vote. Then someone will always move that the secretary cast one ballot. Now I find this funny, because to do this right we would actually be voting on if we should vote or not. If that motion were to fail, we would still have a pending application and the membership would have to vote. My question is, with the secretary casting one ballot, is it possible / allowable for the secretary to vote no on the applicant? In a regular election (like for officers) there is no way to vote no, as one can only vote for a candidate. However in the case of an applicant, where it is impossible to have more than one candidate, is this more like a motion with yes/no options than it is like an election? If the secretary only has one option, it seems needlessly redundant to even have the single ballot cast, because like any race with only one candidate the president could just declare the person the winner by acclimation.

As part of our ongoing bylaws revision process, we found a couple of articles that reference other articles. For the most part this is generally referencing an earlier section. Like Article 10 referencing Article 2. Is it allowable, in constructing bylaws, to reference a later section, like having Article 4 reference Article 12? To my eye, this doesn't look natural, and I vaguely remember reading somewhere that you can reference earlier section because the presumption is that you have already read that on your way to where you are, but you can't reference later sections because you haven't read that far ahead yet. The rest of my committee doesn't have a problem with this. I am just curious if this is in keeping with general practice.

Sounds like the key here is if the assembly knows why the member wants to suspend the rules. If the person stands up and simply makes a motion to suspend the rules, or to suspend a specific rule and does not say why, then it is up to the membership to vote yay or nay. In my opinion, voting yay with such limited information would be foolhardy. That being said, I personally might vote to suspend the rules, then speak against and vote against the endorsement, when tht motion is made, but that is just my way of thinking.

They are not the same person, but we are a small enough organization that news travels fast. This is only hypothetical anyway, but a committee member brought it up as something we might want to fix. I have seen some questionable suspensions in my brief time with the department, so nothing would surprise me if the contents of such a letter were shared. While the discipline process is customized, I was really looking to see if the terms of a suspension were defined within RONR, since that is our parliamentary authority. Being that a suspension can be limited to a few areas, but generally within our department is not, I am inclined to agree that it restricts all rights of membership. We have a very good, appeals system for suspensions, but that takes some time and I doubt that if this scenario were to play out, we could hear seven separate appeals before a special meeting would occur.

Our fire department bylaws are silent on what exactly happens when a member is suspended for disciplinary reasons. I have always thought this suspended everything about someone's membership, including being able to attend meetings. Some in our department say that you are not allowed on the property when you are under suspension. With one exception, I have never seen anything actually say either of these restrictions and we have one member that says you have to be able to come to meetings because the meeting is the final arbiter of a suspension. We do have a fairly well-defined suspension process that includes who can suspend a member and how to appeal a suspension. So as part of our bylaw revision, one committee member has come up with an interesting hypothetical situation and we are trying to see if there is a way to prevent it. Removing an officer other than the chief can be done at any meeting with a motion on the floor. Removing the chief requires a special meeting. A special meeting requires a written request to the president by seven members. This committee member is worried that if seven members request this meeting, the chief would be able to see the letter and could suspend those seven members. This would effectively prevent them from presenting their case to the membership. Is there anything in RONR that would allow a suspended member to attend, speak and vote at a meeting?

As part of our long but almost finished revision of the by-laws we found an odd rule for our annual meeting. There is a list of 15 voting rules governing elections but one has some wording that I think is incorrect as far as RONR and is generally a bad idea in general. 9. The secretary shall, prior to the annual meeting, have ballots printed with the names of candidates, and the position they are running for, and the option of abstention. My first question is if w should even have an option to mark an abstention, since I have always thought of abstentions as not voting at all. My second question would be if we need to require a place for write ins on the ballot. As background I have only seen the written abstention used last year, it seems to have been forgotten about in previous years. There is a story from one of our senior members about the night all but one person wrote abstain on their ballots and how that (incorrectly) effected the election. I have seen in previous years where the ballots were handwritten and not printed, but I think that might be a minor quibble at best.

Well no attempt of moving the date was changed, although when the physicals were announced, it was said that the meeting would be held after the physicals. I am going to try and get some food there, in the past there have been a few snacks & drinks but nothing substantial.