Agenda item: Roll Call

[Guest Marjorie Hemmer]

My church by-laws are set up to require an annual business meeting and that meeting should be governed by common rules of parliamentary procedure. The agenda for the meeting is laid out in a specific way that requires a "roll call" immediately after the meeting is called to order so that a quorum may be determined. My question is this; does the "roll call" have to be vocal or can it be taken silently by the church secretary

 

Thank you, 

Marjorie Hemmer

Church Treasurer

[Tom Coronite]

RONR specifies the procedure for a roll call vote indicating that the names are called, and the members respond when called. If that's not what was envisioned when this bylaw was written, I can't imagine what else would be.

If there's no "call" in the roll call, the secretary would simply be counting in his head, and why would he keep counting once he got to the number needed for a quorum?

[Benjamin Geiger]

I would presume that the "silent roll call" would be the secretary recognizing members and recording their presence. If the organization is small enough, the secretary could probably recognize all of the members by sight.

(In our organization, members sign the roll as they enter the hall.)

[Tom Coronite]

That makes sense. But that sounds an awful lot more like taking attendance than determining if a quorum is present. 🙂

[Josh Martin]

16 hours ago, Guest Marjorie Hemmer said:

My church by-laws are set up to require an annual business meeting and that meeting should be governed by common rules of parliamentary procedure. The agenda for the meeting is laid out in a specific way that requires a "roll call" immediately after the meeting is called to order so that a quorum may be determined. My question is this; does the "roll call" have to be vocal or can it be taken silently by the church secretary

It should first be noted that RONR does not require that a roll call be taken at all. The presence of a quorum can be determined simply by counting the number of members present (and stopping when the required number of members is reached), since it is not necessary to know which specific members are present to determine if a quorum is present. This does not need to be formally listed on the agenda. It may indeed be a silent count. So if the only purpose of this is to establish the presence of a quorum, it would be best not to include this on the agenda.

When a roll call is prescribed by the organization’s rules or customs, however, this is generally done by the Secretary calling each officer’s name (or each member’s name, in small assemblies) and recording their responses.

Other assemblies which track attendance have other methods for accomplishing this, but they’re not really a “roll call.”

Edited April 19, 2019 at 01:08 PM by Josh Martin

[jstackpo]

And it is, of course, worth noting that "determining if a quorum is present" is something the chair does before calling the meeting to order - p. 25, line 10.