Voting on minutes

[Guest Drew Snider]

When the minutes of the previous meeting come up for approval, are only those who were at the previous meeting allowed to vote on that question?

[Richard Brown]

No.  All members may vote on corrections to the minutes regardless of whether they were at the meeting in question.    However, no vote should be taken on actually approving the minutes.  The minutes should simply be declared approved by the chair after all corrections, if any, have been made.

 

See RONR pages 354-355 and 473-475.

[Guest Drew Snider]

Interesting ... thanks for the quick reply! We're in the midst of an annual general meeting and the question came up about who could vote to approve the minutes of last year's AGM ... but you say that the only vote is to approve corrections to the minutes?

[George Mervosh]

Interesting ... thanks for the quick reply! We're in the midst of an annual general meeting and the question came up about who could vote to approve the minutes of last year's AGM ... but you say that the only vote is to approve corrections to the minutes?

 

That's right.  When that process is done the presiding officer declares them approved.

 

However your group must stop waiting a year to approve minutes.......that's quite improper. 

 

RONR states:  "When the next regular business session will not be held within a quarterly time interval (see pp. 89–90), and the session does not last longer than one day, or in an organization in which there will be a change or replacement of a portion of the membership, the executive board or a committee appointed for the purpose should be authorized to approve the minutes. The fact that the minutes are not then read for approval at the next meeting does not prevent a member from having a relevant excerpt read for information; nor does it prevent the assembly in such a case from making additional corrections, treating the minutes as having been previously approved (see third paragraph below)."  RONR (11th ed.), pp. 474-475

 

So have the assembly adopt a motion to have the board approve the minutes, or appoint a committee to approve them, as per the citation above.

[Gary Novosielski]

Interesting ... thanks for the quick reply! We're in the midst of an annual general meeting and the question came up about who could vote to approve the minutes of last year's AGM ... but you say that the only vote is to approve corrections to the minutes?

Yes, and even that vote is almost never done.  Most of the time corrections are approved by unanimous consent.   It might go like this:

 

 

Pres:  Are there any corrections to the minutes?

 

Mr. A:  Mr. President... <Pres. recognizes Mr. A.>   In the third paragraph, the guest speaker was identified as Mr. Smith, when his name is properly spelled "Smythe".

 

Pres:  If there is no objection, the spelling will be corrected to Smythe.  Is there objection?  <pause>  The chair hears none, and the correction will be made.  Are there any further corrections?  <pause>  There being no further corrections to the minutes, the minutes stand approved as corrected.   The next item of business is....

 

 

If there had been objection to the correction, the chair would treat it as an amendment to the correction, and ultimately put the proposed correction to a vote, but there would still be no need for a vote on final approval, since the only way to object to the approval of minutes is to propose a correction.  If no corrections were offered, the chair would simply say "...the minutes stand approved as read [or as printed]"

[Guest Drew Snider]

Thank you very much for your quick and comprehensive replies!