Gary Novosielski

You keep saying "they decided". They cannot decide, unless you let them get away with it. Stop trying to persuade them, and start trying to persuade your fellow members. If your comfort is more important, though, then I suppose whatever happens is okay with you. It's all the same to me.

Based on that quote from the bylaws, once the board has published its list of nominees, its work is done. By what authority to they insert themselves into the process of the election beyond that moment? This is not a board meeting, this is a meeting of the Congregation, and the Congregation settles all questions of how the voting takes place. The Board has no business "deciding" anything, especially as these decisions appear to violate the bylaws, and if not, to certainly violate the rules in RONR. It is sometimes worth a reminder that a Board is intended to be a subordinate body to a Congregation, not the ruling power.

And under ordinary circumstances, it would be a simple matter to clarify this with a motion to hold the mail vote by ballot. But since all of this is taking place outside of a meeting of the body which should have complete control over any questions involving its own voting, that's not possible. Fair enough, but as for me, while I respect the right of the association to adopt unfair, unworkable, and undemocratic bylaws provisions, I don't have to like it. I'm also not convinced that the bylaws are being properly observed, either. There's certainly no rule permitting email voting.

I think it would be well to include a citation in the bylaws or parliamentary authorityunder which the motion will be made. If you can't state that, it's quite possible you don't have the capability to do so. Be aware that for a special meeting, the specific description of the business to be transacted must be stated in the call of the meeting. Do not confuse this will a requirement for previous notice, or the contents of an agenda. (see 9:16)

Your concerns are well-founded. A ballot vote should be anonymous. You will get no argument here. That's one of the reasons why email voting is not in order, if the rules in RONR apply. But you seem to be preaching to the choir. By the way, all members should be aware of the report of the tally. It is not proper to simply announce which side won and lost.

Failure to take the negative vote is a breach of the rules, but the result stands unless someone raises a timely Point of Order (§23) at the time of the breach. This is the so-called YSYL rule: "You snooze, you lose." Whenever there is a substantive violation of the rules, all members have the duty to raise a Point of Order to call it to the attention of the Chair. There are certain continuing breaches for which a Point of Order can be raised at a later time, which are covered in 23:6.

Yes, they could, and that's probably what happens, but with such rules, the board has (or thinks it has) the power to declare membership meetings "inconvenient" and so remove the power of the membership to amend, debate, form committees, raise points of order, or propose new "matters", among other things.

If the rules in RONR apply, the Board may not propose a slate at all. You don't say, but I have to assume that your bylaws authorize the Board to do this. Ordinarily this would be done by a Nominating Committee, reporting to the membership, independent of the board and most particularly of the president. Also, RONR does not provide for voting Yes or No on a "slate" of candidates. The nomination report to the membership is a list of nominees, not an indivisible "slate", and the membership is free to vote on each office independently. If additional nominees are named from the floor, these are added on an equal basis with the reported list of nominees, before any votes are cast. For offices which, at that point, have more than one nominee, elections will be required. In fact, if the bylaws require a ballot vote without an exception for unopposed nominees, then ballot votes are required for all offices. Ballots, where used, must include the ability to write in eligible persons who have not been nominated. So you'll need to carefully go over your bylaws, and see how they change the default procedures in RONR. If what you describe is what the bylaws say, then those changes are fairly major ones.

My advice included the fact that the bylaws always prevail, which I reaffirm. But the bylaws here are anything but clear. Yes, they appear to say that the board may call mail votes (not email votes), but there's no indication of how and in what body a motion must be made. The bylaws language contains no clue how these "matters of [membership] business" come into being. Apparently these motions move themselves, outside of any meeting, or perhaps during board meetings, and then the board decides what the membership wants them to say, who votes on them, and when. That's ambiguous enough, in my view, that Guest Kathy Guest has every right raise a Point of Order regarding the practice. But if she should choose to do so, how can that be done? Presuming she is not a board member, she cannot properly raise a Point of Order at a board meeting, and if the board decides that a membership meeting would be inconvenient (To them? To the members? We don't know.) there's no opportunity for members to raise such points. If all this is fine with most members, then Guest Kathy Guest's ability to reclaim the membership's authority will not succeed. But even if the membership agrees with her, their course of action is narrow. It seems to me that the only course the membership has when presented with votes from on high is to assure that fewer than one-third of the members return their ballots.

The board sounds like they are assuming powers that boards don't typically have. Boards can't typically "call for a vote" of the membership. Yes, a vote can only take place on a motion, but if the membership is to vote on it, it must be a motion made in a membership meeting. The process you describe of boards making up things to vote on and sending out ballots does not correspond to anything in RONR. If your bylaws allow for this, that's different, but all we can tell you is what the rules in RONR say. As to who should run the vote, presuming there has been a motion at a membership meeting, opportunity for debate and amendment, etc., then the secretary, possibly with help, would mail out ballots, and receive the returned ballots, keeping them sealed until time to count them. The count would take place by a Tellers Committee, chosen for impartiality, appointed by the chair, unless the membership intervenes, and the tellers would check the received envelopes against the membership list to ensure that nobody voted twice, and for validated ballots, open the inner envelope and place the ballot, now anonymous, into a box or pile without unfolding it. After all the now-anonymous ballots have been combined, counting would be done, and a report issued at a meeting. Based on the count, the chair would announce the result. Note that the board, as such, has no role, although it is common for the president of the board and the secretary of the board would have the same role in matters of the membership. Common but not universal. Your rules supersede the rules in RONR.

No, it means that no individual member can force an item onto an agenda. Presumably a member of the body that is meeting. What sort of meeting is this? If it's a board meeting then yes, only a board member can propose a change to the agenda, but it takes a vote of the board to make it so. If it's a membership meeting, then the rule is similar, except board members have no role.

What sort of an organization is this? If items were accidentally placed in New Business, then they probably should be removed, and place in either Special Orders or, probably, Unfinished Business and General Orders. Whether it's allowed or not depends on your customized rules. RONR has nothing to say about it because if the rules in RONR apply, any draft agenda is open to change at will by the board at the start of the meeting. If anything isn't right, they can just fix. Whoever is writing up the draft agenda can presumably make changes up until the time it is presented at the board meeting. But if you have some other rules about who prepares the agenda, what do they say? I can imagine a situation where the appointing of a new board member (presumably filling a vacancy) would best be handled earlier in the meeting so that the vacancy could be filled and the new members seated to be able to participate in the remainder of the meeting. I get the feeling that you're leaving a lot unsaid.

If someone knows, then it's not anonymous. The board should have no involvement at all in a vote of the membership, much less access to how individuals voted. <shudder>

Voting by mail using a secret ballot is not problematic at all. A dual envelope system, such as that described in RONR (12th ed.) 45:60 maintains secrecy. But it is quite problematic in email voting, since without some complex encryption algorithms it becomes impossible to conceal the identity of the voter, even from those people counting the votes. In any case, since it's not allowed in your bylaws, it is strictly prohibited by RONR, and any such election would be null and void.

Exactly. And if they elect to do these things under some body of rules substantially unlike RONR, they are at liberty to do so in my absence.

I'm happy to go with that interpretation. I know that some agenda-dependent organizations do list items under New Business, and some of them have to by rule, others by custom, and still more by overlooking bad habits. But rather than fall into that last category myself, I agree it's proper to leave New Business unblemished, and list actual orders of the day where they rightfully belong.

I am not a lawyer, in Connecticut or anywhere, but if the English language spoken there is anything like that spoken elsewhere, including the dialect employed in RONR, the phrase two-thirds of the votes cast means that out of all the votes cast, two-thirds of them or more must be affirmative votes in order to adopt the question. A quick way of calculating this is, if the number of Yes votes is double the number of No votes (or greater) then the motion is adopted. Abstentions do not matter, so people who sit and fail to vote do not affect the outcome, since the have cast no votes. Only a Yes or a No is a vote. As @Josh Martin points out, this should not be confused with a quorum requirement which has no affect on voting thresholds.

Yeah, it very well might, so as soon as it's put under New Business it doesn't belong there.

Well, that's another question. Do you have rules about who constructs the agenda? Does it get amended/adopted by the assembly at the top of the meeting? For that matter, do you need an agenda? Even organizations that do use one often have no detail under the New Business header, and just play that part by ear.

Well, since the rule (which I think should be a Special Rule of Order rather than a Standing Rule) provides that any of these bodies can go into closed session at its discretion, there is no apparent breach of any duration, other than a failure to observe custom. If the society wants to place this custom on firm ground, it will need to amend the rule.

No, it may be nothing more organized than who seeks recognition first. If there's an opportunity to prearrange the order of some items, there may be logical reasons to put some things before others, as with considering several bylaws amendments which could depend on each other in some way. Do what makes sense.

I've run into another variation of despotism in the absence of Robert's Rules, and that is consensus decision-making. The supposed "wisdom" was that requiring a supermajority would cause a greater buy-in on decisions Of course the opposite was true. The term supermajority is a fiction. What it created was minority rule, where a small minority could block any action and would use that power as a club. (I know, you're thinking "Ripped from the Headlines" but this was long ago.) Since then I have a personal standing rule not to join an organization that did not use RONR as its parliamentary authority. That has allowed me to dodge a bullet or two. (Metaphorically--I also dodged one or two literal ones, but that was due to being drafted into an organization that also did not use Robert's Rules. The exception proves the rule.)

But in this case we are told that the city attorney, citing the red text of the municipal code, opines that the agenda presented by the mayor in advance of the meeting is binding, though additional items may be added by a vote of the council. If that's true, we would not expect a motion to adopt the agenda. This is consistent with sunshine laws I've worked under, where the presiding officer or his designee prepared an agenda which was published in advance, and was deemed to be binding without formal approval, though a majority vote could modify it. The agenda prep was covered by regulations. I believe the majority vote was as a result of case law, as a court had decided (wrongly in my view) that elected boards could not be held to a vote requirement beyond a majority with a few exceptions. In particular, suspending rules or amending something previously adopted, did not require a two-thirds vote.

The Oxford comma is purely a matter of style, and writers can be divided into two camps: Those that endorse its use, and those that deprecate it. For clarity, these camps can be referred to as Right and Wrong, respectively. 😀 I'm in @Weldon Merritt's camp, i.e., Right. I never intentionally omit an Oxford comma--if for no other reason than to avoid the need to examine the language to see if it's clear. Just put it in and be done with it. That way you never accidentally end up with nonsense sentences such as: I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty.

I concur with @Rob Elsman that the rules on your agendas are probably regulated by open meeting (so-called Sunshine) laws.