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Change of member's vote affecting chair's ability to vote


Sean Hunt

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If a request to change a vote (with unanimous consent) is granted, and this would affect the chair's ability to vote, how should this be handled?

In particular, suppose a motion passes by two votes and a member who went to the washroom walks in just as the chair announces the count, trying to vote against but is too late. Unanimous consent is granted for him to register his vote (and let's not belabor the wisdom of doing so), and at this point, the vote count now allows the chair to vote and defeat the motion. Does he have to have unanimous consent to register that vote, or, since this is his first opportunity to vote, does he simply do so?

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If a request to change a vote (with unanimous consent) is granted, and this would affect the chair's ability to vote, how should this be handled?

In particular, suppose a motion passes by two votes and a member who went to the washroom walks in just as the chair announces the count, trying to vote against but is too late. Unanimous consent is granted for him to register his vote (and let's not belabor the wisdom of doing so), and at this point, the vote count now allows the chair to vote and defeat the motion. Does he have to have unanimous consent to register that vote, or, since this is his first opportunity to vote, does he simply do so?

Well, first of all, let's make sure we have a few things clear, as your use of phrases like "ability to vote" and "opportunity to vote" is making me nervous. The chair, if a member, always has the right to vote, however, in large assemblies he refrains from exercising that right except when his vote would affect the result or when the vote is taken by ballot.

With respect to the situation presented, in my opinion, the chair would need unanimous consent to cast a vote after the result has been announced, just like any other member.

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Well, first of all, let's make sure we have a few things clear, as your use of phrases like "ability to vote" and "opportunity to vote" is making me nervous. The chair, if a member, always has the right to vote, however, in large assemblies he refrains from exercising that right except when his vote would affect the result or when the vote is taken by ballot.

But this is a rule, not a guideline. The chair has the right, but is not permitted to exercise it unless it's necessary (to affect the outcome) or it if it would not violate his impartiality (casting by ballot). Thus it can be argued that the chair has in this instance been denied his right to vote, since he was not permitted to cast it before, nor after without unanimous consent.

EDIT:

The chair could object to the unanimous consent request, so he had given tacit approval for the change in the vote.

I think he would have to announce the new or "changed" result, and could cast his own vote (if it makes a difference) at that point.

I think you misunderstand here; the motion is going to pass, say by a vote of 23 to 21. The late member's vote, cast by unanimous consent, makes it 23 to 22. At this point, the chair wishes to register his vote to bring it to 23 to 23, defeating the motion. The conflict here is between the notion that the result of a vote can only be changed by unanimous consent and the chair's right to cast his vote.

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I agree with Mr. Martin’s “first of all” except that I would put it in second place. :)

The primary difficulty is the fact that, while this question purports to deal with a member’s request to change his vote (RONR, 10th ed., pp. 46, 395), the facts describe a situation in which a member who was absent at the time the vote was taken attempts to vote after the result of the vote has been announced.

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scshunt: "the vote count now allows the chair to vote"

Not so.

scshunt: "The chair has the right, but is not permitted to exercise it"

Not so. (And that's an oxymoron: a thing that is not permitted to be exercised is in no sense a right.)

Please re-read Mr Martin's post. Nothing about the vote count "allows" the chair to vote: as a member, he is, equally with all other members, always allowed to vote. And the flip side: yes he is, of course permitted. To appear impartial, he refrains. Refraining is voluntary. Nothing about permission is involved.

This is tricky and subtle, as I see it. We have similar discussions about member-parliamentarians.

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And scshunt, please recast your scenario to make it easier for Mr Honemann to digest this late in the day. Leave your member in the room, say he had a three-minute sneezing fit. (Sternutation, the bane of parliamentary decorum. And sometimes hygiene.)

I don't think that'll be enough to ease the Wrathful One's late-day difficulties. The citation dealt with changing a vote. But sneezing, fainting, leaving for a nature break or being abducted by aliens does not involve changing a vote, it involves not casting one--and then being allowed to cast it late.

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But this is a rule, not a guideline. The chair has the right, but is not permitted to exercise it unless it's necessary (to affect the outcome) or it if it would not violate his impartiality (casting by ballot). Thus it can be argued that the chair has in this instance been denied his right to vote, since he was not permitted to cast it before, nor after without unanimous consent.

EDIT:

I think you misunderstand here; the motion is going to pass, say by a vote of 23 to 21. The late member's vote, cast by unanimous consent, makes it 23 to 22. At this point, the chair wishes to register his vote to bring it to 23 to 23, defeating the motion. The conflict here is between the notion that the result of a vote can only be changed by unanimous consent and the chair's right to cast his vote.

The chair always has the right to vote. As chair of a large assembly, he agrees not to exercise this right except when his vote would affect the result or when the vote is taken by ballot. If the chair insisted on voting when his vote would not affect the result, however, he could not be prevented from voting. A chair who did this repeatedly might not remain chair for very long, but the fact remains that a member's right to vote may only be denied as a result of disciplinary procedures or a rule in the Bylaws. (RONR, 10th ed., pg. 255, lines 25-28) The chair has not been denied his right to vote.

The primary difficulty is the fact that, while this question purports to deal with a member’s request to change his vote (RONR, 10th ed., pp. 46, 395), the facts describe a situation in which a member who was absent at the time the vote was taken attempts to vote after the result of the vote has been announced.

Don't the same principles apply for casting a late vote as for changing a vote?

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Don't the same principles apply for casting a late vote as for changing a vote?

I'm not aware of anything in RONR that says so, and I believe that the rules of the House (excluding those that deal with votes cast by electronic means) vary in this regard (compare the Parliamentarian's Note in Section 35.1 with Section 40.7 of Chapter 30, Deschler-Brown Precedents).

I should add, however, that I do not claim to be any sort of expert on the rules of the House, and welcome any correction as to my understanding of them in this regard.

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Don't the same principles apply for casting a late vote as for changing a vote?

As well as being irrepressibly ruminative, I'm also a picker of nits and can often find myself pedantic to a fault. Where RONR discusses changing one's vote, I take it not to mean casting a vote, particularly after the vote has occurred and the results announced. However, we've had this discussion previously in regards to changing one's "vote" from an abstention to an aye or no, and vice versa. And in reflection upon that discussion, I'm left with a niggling doubt, though still tending towards the YSYL factor at play.

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I'm not aware of anything in RONR that says so, and I believe that the rules of the House (excluding those that deal with votes cast by electronic means) vary in this regard (compare the Parliamentarian's Note in Section 35.1 with Section 40.7 of Chapter 30, Deschler-Brown Precedents).

I should add, however, that I do not claim to be any sort of expert on the rules of the House, and welcome any correction as to my understanding of them in this regard.

Okay, so does RONR address this issue at all? If a member walks into the room after the chair announces the result of the vote but before he states the question on the next item of business and the member wishes to cast a vote on the question and requests to cast a vote, how should the chair respond to the request?

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Eeep! I apologize for getting us started on this wrong discussion... in any case, I would have to think that, with unanimous consent, the assembly could just Suspend the Rules. It doesn't seem worth splitting the nits on whether or not the fundamental parliamentary principle of debate is here being violated since the member could have walked in just before the vote and cast a vote without having heard a word of argument.

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Okay, so does RONR address this issue at all? If a member walks into the room after the chair announces the result of the vote but before he states the question on the next item of business and the member wishes to cast a vote on the question and requests to cast a vote, how should the chair respond to the request?

I think the chair should advise the member that it's too late for him to cast a vote. Voting is restricted to members who are "actually present at the time the vote is taken" (p. 408).

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Eeep! I apologize for getting us started on this wrong discussion...

I think this side discussion has been rather fruitful.

It doesn't seem worth splitting the nits on whether or not the fundamental parliamentary principle of debate is violated...

Debate isn't a fundamental principle of parliamentary law, since many motions are undebatable and even on debatable motions, debate may be suspended by a 2/3 vote.

Being present at the time the vote is taken, however, is an FPPL.

I think the chair should advise the member that it's too late for him to cast a vote. Voting is restricted to members who are "actually present at the time the vote is taken" (p. 408).

Okay, and that's a fundamental principle of parliamentary law, so not even unanimous consent would be sufficient to suspend this rule.

What if the member had been present but had not voted?

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That brings us back to this discussion, I think.

Okay... so the same principle applies unless the member is absent when the vote is taken, in which case pg. 408 is controlling. I think I've got it now.

So if scshunt is still looking for opinions on his original question, I suppose we should pretend that the member in his original example was present but napping. :)

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Okay... so the same principle applies unless the member is absent when the vote is taken, in which case pg. 408 is controlling. I think I've got it now.

So if scshunt is still looking for opinions on his original question, I suppose we should pretend that the member in his original example was present but napping. :)

Well, I think his original premise has a bit to do with J. J.'s question of sometime back, assuming the member was at the meeting prior to the vote, which is how I read the original post. However, in that example, the "absent" member was present at the time the vote commenced (and before it was completed). We don't have that (first) particular info in the current scenario, so I guess we've been operating under the assumption that it was not the case here. And that may be the rub.

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Debate isn't a fundamental principle of parliamentary law, since many motions are undebatable and even on debatable motions, debate may be suspended by a 2/3 vote.

Being present at the time the vote is taken, however, is an FPPL.

Maybe I'm interpreting FPPLs too broadly here, but I think that they are, first and foremost, principles. This means that they're abstract concepts that you mold your rules around, rather than simply being super special rules. As a result, when you consider why it is that members are required to be present to vote - so that they may have partaken in the debate and fully understood the issue in the deliberative nature of the assembly - it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to set a very precise line and say "If you weren't in the room at this instant, you cannot vote." and call that a fundamental principle of parliamentary law. The cutoff point exists simply because the abstract principle is not fundamentally enforceable. If there existed some magical and fair system to measure people's presence at the debate over a motion in a binary sense, I would support that metric over any metric that measured simply by presence at the meeting - even allowing absentees to vote if they had been present for the entire debate, for surely they have a better perspective on the issue than someone who just happened to walk in the door as the vote started (and at this point I'm reminded of various Canadian MPs complaining that they'd occasionally be shepherded into the House for a vote when they didn't even have a clue what they were voting on, but they would just vote with the senior members of the party).

I think we also see this reflected in the various attempts to establish rules of order for and conduct meetings by teleconferencing and other forms of live telecommunication. In my mind, this is a recognition that the fundamental principle is one of participation in the deliberations of the assembly rather than a physical presence at the meeting.

Additionally, I don't think that undebateable motions violate the fundamental deliberative characteristic of the assembly. When a motion is undebateable, it is because it would violate its purpose (or the purpose of a related motion, such as for an Appeal regarding the Previous Question) to allow it to be debated. The power of a two-thirds majority to control debate is partially a recognition of the fact that a larger majority has more power, but also of the fact that there will often come a point where some members continue to belabor the same points repeatedly and the other members (likely on both sides of the issue) recognize that there is, in effect, no more useful deliberation to take place.

Perhaps I'm looking too deeply into the fundamental principle, and it's just that "people present get to vote". But then I would say that it's not a very good principle to have.

That said, I do see that there could be one argument by which a member who, having participated in the debate, couldn't be allowed to vote, and that's just because you need to have an immutable cutoff. If there weren't such a cutoff, the decision to admit votes would go to the assembly, and it should not be the assembly's prerogative to accept or deny a vote since it will invariably get used politically.

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Maybe I'm interpreting FPPLs too broadly here, but I think that they are, first and foremost, principles. This means that they're abstract concepts that you mold your rules around, rather than simply being super special rules.

Except that some of these "concepts" have been less-abstractly solidified into print, making them in fact rules as well and not just concepts around which other rules are molded. The words are there, in The Book, on page 408 as relates to the larger topic at hand here. As such, with RONR adopted as the parliamentary authority, the rules contained therein are on a relative par with those found in the bylaws that have been molded around the concepts contained in RONR.

As a result, when you consider why it is that members are required to be present to vote - so that they may have partaken in the debate and fully understood the issue in the deliberative nature of the assembly

Well, presence and participation are no guarantee of this, and we have more than once read of societies wherein the masses vote along with the leadership or other clique, quite clearly not voting their conscience or the "facts." In the end, if I arrive at a meeting just in time to vote on the question of whether to spend $5000 on a new clubhouse, it may be less important that I hear what Billy Joe Jim Bob had to say about it (as well-reasoned his arguments may be) than whether I think that expense is justified.

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Maybe I'm interpreting FPPLs too broadly here...

You are. I think you may be confusing FPPLs with the principles underlying parliamentary law. (RONR, 10th ed., pgs. xlvii-xlviii) Your understanding of the nature of debate in a deliberative assembly is consistent with those principles. Debate is clearly not an FPPL, however, since if it was, it could not be suspended. (RONR, 10th ed., pg. 255, lines 3-5) The text clearly states that it is an FPPL that a member must be present at the time the vote is taken. (RONR, 10th ed., pg. 408, lines 31-34)

As for your argument as to why this is an FPPL, you may be on to something, considering the wording on RONR, 10th ed., pg. 1, lines 12-14; pg. 482, line 28 - pg. 483, line 2. It seems quite possible that this is at least part of the reason behind the rule, although I doubt it is the full story.

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