Nomination by Slate

[Guest Innesha]

Today we had our annual five committee meetings. On each agenda we had election of officers (President, Secretary Treasurer) someone at the meeting said instead of doing each election separately we could nominate by "slate". I had never heard the term before. Can someone explain this to me? Could we also use this for a item e.g. approval of investment policy that was on each agenda?

[Trina]

Referring to a group of candidates as a 'slate' is not a practice endorsed by RONR. It gives the erroneous impression that the voter must vote for the whole group en masse (like the old party lever on voting machines).

However, your mention of five committees and five agendas (?) gives me pause -- I don't think I understand enough of the structure of the meeting (or meetings), or how you all were thinking of combining votes between the different committees. What do you have in mind when you speak of "approval of investment policy that was on each agenda" ?

[Guest Innesha]

We have five non-profit and profit affiliates. At this meeting we had all five affiliates meet. Each affiliate has a separate agenda. The same five people are directors on all the affiliates. Sometimes the same item is on each agenda (e.g. approval of the investment policy). We also had elections for President, Secretary, Treasurer. Someone at the meeting suggested that since we approved the investment policy at the first meeting and also elected a President, Secretary, etc. instead of having separate motions for each meeting for the same item we could do one motion to approve by "slate" for all the affiliates. Nobody had heard the term "slate" before.