Dan Honemann

On 4/11/2024 at 1:50 PM, Josh Martin said:

I agree that it's not unusual for organizations to hold an unnecessary "yes/no" vote to approve an unopposed nominee, but that doesn't mean it's proper to do so. Unless the bylaws require a ballot vote, if there is only one nominee, the chair should declare the nominee elected by acclamation.

On 4/11/2024 at 1:50 PM, Josh Martin said:

Unless the bylaws require a ballot vote, if there is only one nominee, the chair should declare the nominee elected by acclamation.

I'm sure you mean that this is so only if the election is to be by voice vote.

On 4/11/2024 at 9:29 AM, Guest Kay C said:

He doesn’t qualify to be a member. 

By this do you mean that he does not meet the eligibility requirements set forth in your bylaws?

On 4/10/2024 at 10:48 PM, clmsntgrs said:

My organization is holding elections for a couple of officers on our board.  It is my responsibility as Secretary to run the election. 

This is rather unusual, so I assume this is pursuant to your organization's rules.

On 4/10/2024 at 10:48 PM, clmsntgrs said:

In our bylaws it states that each candidate for our Director position may give a 3 minute speech prior to members casting votes.  Although not stated in our bylaws I would like to allow time for members to ask questions of the candidates after each has completed their speeches. 

Much depends upon exactly what your bylaws provide in this connection.  It may well be that they preclude any question and answer period such as this. If not, the assembly (not you individually) may adopt a rule providing for such a question and answer period.  

On 4/10/2024 at 10:48 PM, clmsntgrs said:

I've done some research and I'm not quite sure what this period for questions would be called.  Also I'm not sure how to formally make a motion to move us to this period.  Just trying to figure the correct terms to use to allow for questions, end the questions period and then move to casting ballots.  Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Draft a motion stating exactly what you want this rule to say and arrange for someone to make it (if you are presiding you should not do it yourself). This should be framed as a rule to be applicable during the current meeting only, which will enable the assembly to adopt it by a two-thirds vote without previous notice.

On 4/10/2024 at 6:23 PM, Father Cadan said:

Between the nomination and election meeting

 

Yes, I understand that the attempt by the nominee to withdraw his nomination, the nominating committee's decision to nominate someone else, and the original nominee's attempt to withdraw his withdrawal all have occurred after the nomination meeting and before the election meeting.

My previous response was based upon this understanding.

On 4/9/2024 at 6:07 PM, Father Cadan said:

Do withdrawn nominations need to be accepted?

On 4/10/2024 at 12:36 PM, Josh Martin said:

Yes.

How so?

On 4/9/2024 at 6:07 PM, Father Cadan said:

Does the Nomination committee having filled the spot change things? 

On 4/10/2024 at 12:36 PM, Josh Martin said:

It means this person will now be treated as if this were a nomination from the floor, rather than a nomination by the Nominating Committee.

As best I can determine, if we assume that the withdrawal of the nomination was effective (I don't think it was) it appears that the nominating committee can't propose another nominee until the election meeting.  And then why wouldn't this nominee be the committee's nominee?

On 4/9/2024 at 6:07 PM, Father Cadan said:

We have a mandatory two week space of time between nominations and elections. Nominations are not allowed at the election meeting. After accepting nomination a member emailed the nominating committee and the secretary withdrawing from the election. 

According to our bylaws when someone is nominated at the nomination meeting and is then unable to serve for whatever reason (I assume this includes no longer desiring to serve) the nomination committee may then fill the position on the ballot.

A week after withdrawing, the member wishes to withdraw their withdrawal. 

If this were a resignation I would understand that the resignation hasn't been accepted so the resignation could be withdrawn. If this were a normal nomination immediately followed by election we could reopen nominations. 

Do withdrawn nominations need to be accepted? Does the Nomination committee having filled the spot change things? 

Most importantly what do we put on our mandatory secret ballot?

 

Thank you in advance for all the advice I've received on this forum.

 

Well, it appears that the notice of the election meeting is to include the reluctant nominee's name no matter what.

"Such notice shall include the names of all nominees approved at the preceding nomination meeting, and, subject to Section 3 above, a statement that these nominees will be voted upon at this election meeting."

If it were up to me, I would not consider the reluctant nominee to be "unable for any reason to serve in the office to which he/she was nominated", and so I think his or her name should appear on the ballot. I also think that your nominating committee is under no obligation to "submit, at the election meeting, names of additional nominees for that office".

You ask "Does the Nomination committee having filled the spot change things?", but I don't see how this can have been done since it appears that this can't be done until the election meeting. 

On 4/9/2024 at 3:27 PM, Rich Starnes said:

A constitutional amendment was offered at a convention last year. It passed with 2/3 vote. According to the constitution, the amendment must pass by 2/3 vote at two consecutive conventions to be adopted. The amendment will be voted on again at this year’s convention.

Question: can the amendment be amended prior to its second vote having been approved once? If so, would the amended version have to be approved at two consecutive conventions? Thanks. 

The answers to these questions must be found in your own governing documents.

On 4/9/2024 at 12:40 PM, Guest Patricia said:

In our 501c3 membership organization we have 5 regular membership meetings per year where you must be a member to attend (either in person or on zoom). We have approximately 120-150 members . A movement to enable electronic voting for all members regardless of attendance is being discussed to add to our bylaws. This will result in negating the need for absentee ballots and possibly even the need for a quorum as no one will be required to attend in order to vote. All issues will be put on a ballot and no in-person votes will be taken. We have existed for nearly 60 years so there is quite a disagreement afoot on what this means to the way our membership meetings regarding voting have been conducted and will be conducted in the future. We do have a board of directors who are elected at our big annual membership meeting, but we have multiple issues that members are asked to vote on (budget, bylaws, etc.) and those issues are discussed in the membership meetings. 

Is there anything in RONR that could help us navigate this?

My own view of it is that you are moving in the wrong direction.  Nothing works as well as in-person meetings for arriving at the best decisions.

On 4/9/2024 at 9:57 AM, Atul Kapur said:

This most closely resembles a motion to Reconsider the vote on the election, but it is not clear from the information provided whether that would be in order at the time it was made.

 

Well, I suppose it most closely resembles a motion to Reconsider and Enter on the Minutes, but that's a bit of a stretch.

On 4/9/2024 at 6:44 AM, Guest Pamela said:

If there are 4 nominees vying for 1 position and a vote is taken where 51 out of 52 members present vote for a specific nominee, can a motion be made immediately after the vote has taken place to vote 30 days from now on the same 4 nominees for the 1 position? I'm told this is documented in Robert's Rules of Order but I'm not finding it. 

Thank you for considering my question.

Such a motion is clearly not in order.

On 4/9/2024 at 3:13 AM, Kathy D said:

Yes, a voting member.  An Officer.

Paragraph 1:4 of the current (12th) edition of Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised reads as follows (pay particular attention to the sentence which I have bolded):

"A member of an assembly, in the parliamentary sense, as mentioned above, is a person entitled to full participation in its proceedings, that is, as explained in 3 and 4, the right to attend meetings, to make motions, to speak in debate, and to vote. No member can be individually deprived of these basic rights of membership—or of any basic rights concomitant to them, such as the right to make nominations or to give previous notice of a motion—except through disciplinary proceedings. Some organized societies define additional classes of “membership” that do not entail all of these rights. Whenever the term member is used in this book, it refers to full participating membership in the assembly unless otherwise specified. Such members are also described as “voting members” when it is necessary to make a distinction."

This is the rule applicable to your organization's proceedings unless your bylaws, or higher authority such as applicable law, provide otherwise.

Were you a member of this "Panel" that was meeting?

On 4/8/2024 at 4:11 PM, Shmuel Gerber said:

 

Nope. I don't understand the question and I have no idea what assumption is being made.

My assumption concerning the facts was that a motion is made and adopted (or rejected) on day one of a two-day session.  No motion to reconsider this vote is made on day one.  The question is, if reconsideration is desired, must the motion to reconsider be made on day two of the session or, if on day two a date and time is fixed for an adjourned meeting, may the motion to reconsider be made during this adjourned meeting.  The answer, of course, is that it must be made on day two.

On 4/8/2024 at 3:32 PM, Shmuel Gerber said:

Or actually the answer is that it is a false choice. The motion can be made on the next succeeding day within the session, which does not have to be the next day on the calendar, and the session itself can be extended by fixing the time for an adjourned meeting.

I think you know the assumption that I made as to the meaning of the facts as stated, and I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that my assumption was correct.

On 4/8/2024 at 2:12 PM, Henry Lawton said:

“37:8   To provide both usefulness and protection against abuse, the motion to Reconsider has the following unique characteristics, as more fully explained in 37:10:

 

b)       Except in committees, it must be moved either on the same day the original vote was taken or on the next succeeding day within the same session on which a business meeting is held.”

 

My question: Can the next succeeding day be extended by “fix the time to which to adjourn” to an adjourn meeting the following day? Or does this mean that the reconsideration must be called on only on the next succeeding day?

 

The latter.

After a bit of prompting, we are told that the main motion pending was: "I move to adopt the proposed calendar."  We have not been provided with this "proposed calendar" which is incorporated by reference into and constitutes a part of the main motion.  

We are then told that, while this motion was pending, the following motion was made: "I move to eliminate the June 1st meeting." This we are told was a motion to amend the pending main motion, but if so it certainly is not in proper form.  Ordinarily, we might be able to put it in proper form, but we simply do not know enough about the pending main motion to enable us to do so.

Then we are told that a motion was made to amend the pending motion to amend "by striking the entire primary amendment and substituting to make June 1st a virtual meeting" and are asked if this is a proper form of secondary amendment.  It is simply not possible to answer this question prior to being provided with the facts needed to put what has been purported to be the proposed primary amendment in order.

On 4/6/2024 at 7:36 PM, Drake Savory said:

"I move to adopt the proposed calendar."

I think what we need to see is what the "proposed calendar" looked like.

On 4/6/2024 at 1:59 PM, Rob Elsman said:

I appreciate the picture of the main motion that you have drawn up in your mind.  For the lack of sufficient information, I had imaged in my own mind that the primary amendment was a motion to strike out words, in which case the secondary amendment to strike out and insert words would not have been in order.  All this goes back to my earlier request for the exact text of the relevant part of the main motion that went unfulfilled.

We certainly are in agreement on this point.  

I think Mr. Novosielski has this right.

Although we are still a little short on facts, it would appear that the motion to amend the main motion was a motion to strike out a paragraph from the main motion (more detailed facts may prove otherwise).  If so, this opened the paragraph that would be struck out to improvement by secondary amendment (see 12:51).

On 4/5/2024 at 3:49 PM, Drake Savory said:

Primary amendment was "cancel the meeting on June 1st". 

Is this supposed to be an example of a subsidiary motion to amend a main motion?  Doesn't look like one to me.

On 4/4/2024 at 5:01 PM, Josh Martin said:

I don't think a Point of Order could be raised until the next convention - assuming the matter in question remains a continuing breach at the time of the next convention.

Why can't a point of order be raised when one of these resolutions is offered at the convention?

I am in full agreement with what Dr. Kapur has posted here, but would also note that, when these bylaws refer to a "mailbox ballot", they seem to be referring to a vote that is more of a vote by mail than it is a ballot vote.  It appears that the object of taking such a vote is more to broaden the base of voters than to enable voters to keep how they vote a secret.

Perhaps the bylaws contain some sort of definition of "mailbox ballot" which may shed additional light on the question now under consideration.

On 4/3/2024 at 11:15 PM, Val said:

In the past, which included amendments to the by-laws and amendments to another Policy Manual Volume, Faculty Personnel Policies, any member can make a motion for a ballot vote. If the motion for a ballot vote is seconded, it passes by a majority vote. Then a ballot vote is done for the amendment to the by-laws or the Faculty Personnel Policies volume. 

This is interesting because, ordinarily, adoption of such a motion would result in a ballot vote being taken at the meeting, and also because the quoted bylaw provision regarding votes to be taken by "mailbox ballot" appears to mandate such a vote under designated circumstances.  I suppose the motion "for a ballot vote" as described here is really a motion to declare that such designated circumstances exist.

On 4/3/2024 at 12:25 PM, Josh Martin said:

Several ideas occur to me, although there are quite likely others.

• You could amend the organization's rule which provides "any member can put an item of new business on the agenda prior to the 24 hour deadline."
• It is not clear to me whether this rule prevents the assembly from amending the agenda to remove the item in question. But even supposing it does, the assembly could amend the agenda so it is the last item on the agenda, and then immediately adjourn before considering the item.
• When the item is reached and the persistent member makes the motion, a member could immediately move to Object to Consideration of the Question, which requires a 2/3 vote and will suppress the question for the duration of the current session. (The advantage of this over the Previous Question is that it can be moved before even the motion maker has an opportunity to speak.)
• The organization could adopt special rules of order providing a longer "waiting period" for a defeated motion to be brought before the assembly again (perhaps with some workarounds built-in in case a legitimate need arises to consider a defeated motion again).

The third suggestion should be enough assuming the undesired motion is an original main motion.  Changing the rules in any respect just because of this nuisance seems to be overkill.

On 4/2/2024 at 3:25 PM, Guest Willie Watson said:

Thanks for your input. But a special rule of order can be suspended by a 2/3 vote and that would defeat the purpose of requiring the notice to be in writing. So I am thinking that if we want to ensure the notice to occur in writing (without it being suspended) it needs to be placed in the bylaws. 

A rule requiring previous notice cannot be suspended.

What, exactly,  do your bylaws say concerning their amendment? 

On 4/2/2024 at 10:27 AM, Jay M said:

I read written motions take priority over the other motions.  I wonder what is is the procedure to follow this rule? Suppose if there is an approved agenda with number of  items can a member   propose a written motion  on any agenda items at any time  with out waiting for the item come up for discussion?  Please clarify . Thanks in advance

There is no such rule.