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Nominating Committee for Political Convention


Guest Convention Rules Guy

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Guest Convention Rules Guy

I am working on a team developing rules for a convention that includes a nominating committee. The nominating committee will choose a slate of delegates to be elected to go to our organizations National Assembly. There are 9 slots available and the nominating committee will nominate members for all nine.

In a normal year we would go through the motions of taking nominations form the floor and there would be few if any other nominees. This year due to internal issues, we are expecting multiple nominations from the floor. I would not be surprised if we had another 20 people nominated. 

I am at a loss as to how to make this an orderly process. How do we elect 9 out of 29? Our custom has been to only allow nominations by nominating committee and from the floor the day of the convention so we won't even know the names or number of nominees in advance.

Your thoughts and advice would be greatly appreciated.

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Put all of the nominee's names on a screen, pass out a blank piece of paper to everyone eligible to vote and instruct them to vote for no more than 9.  Members may also write-in the name of someone not nominated.  Multiple rounds of balloting will probably be needed for 9 to receive a majority of the votes cast.

It's not a bad idea to read RONR (11th ed.), pp. 412-419 for a full description of the procedure.

 

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Guest Convention Rules Guy

George, thanks for the response. We have done precisely what you suggest in the past. When there were only 10 people running for 9 slots it wasn't a big deal. Unfortunately there will be about 2600 members at our convention. The logistics of scoring multiple rounds of 2600 ballots keeps me awake at night. It takes us just over an hour to score one round and this is a one day convention.

One possibility I am mulling over is Single Transferrable Vote but it may be a hard sell when it comes to approval of the rules.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote 

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I would recommend an audience response system where everyone eligible can vote for up to 9 candidates by keypad and the results get tallied immediately.  Repeated voting is lightning quick.  But I suppose this discussion is beyond what we should be talking about here.  Oh, and our friendly moderator may move this over to the General Discussion board if you come back and find this thread missing.

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Just a possibility:  You might check the bylaw-required qualifications for those 29 potential candidates (if you can find out who they are).  With a little luck, some (many?) may prove to be ineligible.  Maybe.  Good luck.

I presume your bylaws are silent to the vote needed to win (or state "majority") but (with yet more luck) a plurality may be explctitly specified. If so, you are done in one round of voting. (Don't get your hopes up too much, however, as to what you might find in the bylaws.)  "Majority" is the RONR default even if your bylaws are silent.

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50 minutes ago, Daniel H. Honemann said:

Stop worrying about it. It will work out just fine.

This is probably correct if the elections aren't likely to be especially contentious. If you have two small factions each trying to elect their own board, but the majority is likely to go over to the nominating committee after a ballot or two, it will be over quick. If not, then the one thing I would be genuinely worried about is that you need to make sure you can keep the venue late. What you don't want to have happen is that the convention venue kicks you out and you have 2600 people trying to finish an election in a pub.

Otherwise, after a round or two of balloting, you will have a convention of 2600 delegates who are rather anxious to get on with things and many probably have to go catch planes/trains/automobiles. The numbers will dwindle, and eventually the smaller groups will start to realize that they're not going to get their way and yield to the larger ones. Or they'll negotiate to allow for 3 candidates from each group to go forward. Or something else. But they're just as human as you are, and they also don't want it to take forever.

The only other thing I would say is, especially since multiple rounds of voting are likely, control the casting of votes, not the distribution of ballots. The number of organizations that try to deal with election issues by only issuing one ballot per person rather than by putting some control on actually sticking the ballot into the box is staggering.

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Guest Convention Rules Guy

Thank you all! Yes, this will be contentious!!! Our bylaws and national Association bylaws are silent on the vote required to elect so as stated her we go by RRONR which sets the default at a majority. We have the opportunity in our rules proposal to specify a plurality and we are giving that serious consideration.

 

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You could adopt a rule for approval voting. The article talks about how to use it with multiple winners. You simply have everyone list all candidates they approve of on their ballots. Voters can list as few or as many as they want (so between 0 and the total number of candidates). When you tally the votes, the nine candidates with the most votes will be the winners, provided that they at least received a majority. If fewer than nine candidates receive a majority, you would need to have another round. The result is overall majoritarian and very simple to count. It reduces the number of repeat ballots necessary, as under the standard RRO procedures you would need to hold multiple ballots until only exactly nine have a majority.

Another possible rule (in addition or instead of the one I previously mentioned) is to have a run off provision where every round the candidate with the lowest score is eliminated. This is not recommended by RRO as it can lead to the elimination of compromise candidates, but it is very practical.

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