Gary Novosielski

Well, let's back up to the point where the chair just made these rules up out of thin air. If the members never approved them, they're not in effect. And unless Zoom meetings are provided for in your bylaws, they're not permitted.

Standard practice is to record the name of the mover, not the seconder. For a voice vote, only the result is recorded. For a counted vote, the counts of yeas and nays is recorded. For a roll-call vote, the response of each person is recorded by name.

It is absurd to say that a bylaws provision that states it cannot be suspended can be suspended. It would take an amendment to strike that sentence, after which other suspendible rules in the nature of rules of order would operate normallyu.

I suppose so, but my own recommendation would still be to take nominations from the floor. The process already has more than the requisite number of board fingerprints all over it. And I guess it was my sense that some deadline had been crossed, prompting the question.

No it is not. The board does not have the authority to nominate candidates. Add to this the fact that a Nominating Committee normally does not report to the Board, but reports directly to the Membership. Normally the chair should have no role in appointing the committee, but if your bylaws require it, then the failure of the chair to perform this duty in a timely manner may be a subject of discipline at the appropriate time. Until then, nominations from the floor should be taken. The "slate" presented by the Board should be ignored by the membership.

At the risk of appearing to speak for Mr. Martin, I suspect the tentativeness arises out of the fact that a motion to Ratify is not adopted until it is adopted, and that is never a certainty until the last vote is counted, and the result announced by the chair.

RONR has no advice on this situation. You will need to search your local documents for an answer. Whether your County Committee bylaws apply in the absence of District Committee bylaws, or whether you will need to adopt your own bylaws might be stated in the County Committee bylaws.

Agreeing with @Joshua Katz, a rule which states who "presides at all meetings" is in the nature of a rule of order and suspendible by a two thirds vote. 62:13 Any one motion to Suspend the Rules that might limit the authority or duties of the presiding officer during a meeting can remain in effect, at most, for one session. (See 8:12, 8:16.) Therefore, in order to prevent the regular presiding officer from presiding during subsequent sessions, the motion to Suspend the Rules would have to be renewed and separately adopted at each of the sessions. Moreover, since Suspend the Rules applies only when “an assembly wishes to do something during a meeting that it cannot do without violating one or more of its regular rules” (25:1, emphasis added), the motion cannot be used to remove from the presiding officer (even temporarily) any administrative duties—those related to the role of an executive officer that are distinct from the function of presiding over the assembly at its meetings. (Cf. 47:20.)

The Golden one works best.

A point of order can only be raised at a meeting. What did you have in mind for "before that"?

Can a Nominating Committee, in fact, make a nomination between meetings? It can certainly meet, deliberate, and vote to report a name, but if there's no meeting until the election, when and to whom do they report this new nomination? And until then isn't it just an undelivered report? On the other hand, if they had met and voted on a name, and that was reported at the election meeting, it would not be a nomination from the floor and so presumably could be added before the election.

There's your answer then. Members are people. In this case, people with the right to vote. Seats are not people, they can't participate in debate, make motions or vote. Or breathe for that matter.

I sounds like you now have two people running for that office. No problem, just hold an election. I'm curious why you can't have additional nominations at the election meeting. RONR says you should.

"In the first place God made idiots. That was for practice. Then He made School Boards." ⁓Mark Twain.

Ask the person who told you that where it is. (He won't be able to find it either.)

The most common reason that people don't want to serve as Recording Secretary is because they think it's too much work. This is often because the minutes customarily include all sorts of extraneous material that does not belong there. The minutes are a record of what was done, not what was said. Look up 48:1-8 in RONR 12th ed., and show it to whomever you're considering for the office, and make it known that keeping the minutes is not the major job people think it is.

Right that's what I meant. Some method whereby a small unrepresentative minority of the members would be prevented from making decisions for the organization.

Well, the rules in RONR say that it is a "fundamental principle of parliamentary law that the right to vote is limited to the members of an organization who are actually present at the time the vote is taken." You can refer to 9:30 ff., for advice on how to structure your bylaws to allow electronic meetings. There is also an Appendix with sample rules for electronic meetings on pp. 635-649. It's definitely not a good idea to eliminate the quorum requirement. What's to stop two or three people from running off with the treasury?

Okay, so it's a board meeting. If the meeting degenerates into chaos, the person responsible is usually the chair. And if the entire board resigns under those conditions, you might want to count your blessings.

Well, yes, especially in this particular instance. There is a lot of truth in what actually happens. That's a little confusing. I know what a board meeting is, and I know what a membership meeting is, but I don't know what a meeting "between" the two is.

If the bylaws are silent on the quorum for any meeting, the rules in RONR say that a quorum is a majority of the members. A member is a living breathing individual who was duly elected or appointed to that body and who has the right to vote.

It is quite probable that your state regulations require that you use RONR as your parliamentary authority. You'd need the advice of a lawyer to determine if that's true in your case. You could probably adopt special rules of order to modify the rules in RONR, or that might not be allowed. The rules proposed by whoever wrote that list indicates that they have no knowledge of what's in RONR since so much of it duplicates the rules in RONR already, or changes them just enough to show that the result was unencumbered by the thought process.

24:1 By electing a presiding officer, the assembly delegates to him the authority and duty to make necessary rulings on questions of parliamentary law. But any two members have the right to Appeal from his decision on such a question. By one member making (or “taking”) the appeal and another seconding it, the question is taken from the chair and vested in the assembly for final decision. 24:2 Members have no right to criticize a ruling of the chair unless they appeal from his decision.

Another thing to consider is that if you elect everyone on the list and do not elect a president, your Vice President candidate will become president at some point.

Where was the chair all this while? A secretary reports the tally of a roll-call vote, and a tellers' committee reports the tally of a ballot vote, but neither ever announces the result. The chair announces the result of the tally. And unless the bylaws specifically say "majority of the members present," the secretary was flat out wrong, anyway. A 6-4 vote is certainly a majority of those present and voting.