Recording Election Results in Minutes

[Druhan]

Robert's Rules, 11th ed., includes an example tellers' report. I am taken to understand that I am to include it, in that form, in the meeting minutes. This is how it looks in the minutes I took:

"A ballot vote was held, and the Secretary and Vice President counted the ballots. The chair announced the results of the Treasurer election:

Number of votes cast........................................... 40

Necessary for election......................................... 21

Mr. A received............................... 16

Mr. B received.................................. 12

Mr. C received.................................... 11

Illegal Votes.

Ballots without a name............................. 1

The chair declared that the result was no election, and a run-off election between Mr. A and Mr. B was held."

What do y'all think about this? Anything you would change? BTW, we require that members put their names on the ballots, so don't worry about that part. I am more concerned with the form of the minutes.

Edited April 9, 2018 at 10:48 PM by Druhan

[Gary Novosielski]

A ballot left blank without a name is an abstention, not an illegal vote.  They are ignored, and do not count as votes cast.  In the example you gave, only 39 votes were cast, and the number needed to elect would be 20.

[Druhan]

When I said "without a name" I meant that he did not write his own name on the ballot, which we require, but he did write the name of the person he voted for.

[Gary Novosielski]

Ah, okay.  Then whether that vote is legal is up to your rules and your assembly to decide.

[Richard Brown]

The form of the tellers report for the minutes is fine. However, there is a bigger mistake. Unless you have a special rule of order to drop the name of the candidate with the fewest number of votes, or unless the rules were suspended to require it, you do not drop any names or have a run-off between just the top two. You vote again leaving all names on the ballot.

And you do it again and again until someone is elected or voluntarily withdrawals. Or until the assembly suspends the rules or adopts a motion by a two-thirds vote to drop names from the ballot.

Do your rules actually require that members put their names on their ballots? That defeats the entire purpose of a ballot vote. Is that a written rule or a custom? By definition, a ballot vote is a secret ballot unless the rules provide otherwise.

Edited April 9, 2018 at 11:12 PM by Richard Brown
Corrected typos caused by using voice to text on a cell phone