Attendance

[Guest Rider]

We are a small 501(c)3 sports group that is having issues with elections. We have a few people who did not submit their membership form until a week after the meeting and did not sign into the meeting but now want to be considered has having joined at that meeting to gain voting rights in time for the December elections. Can they do that?

[Chris Harrison]

If they weren't a member at the time of the meeting then they weren't a member at the meeting.

[Josh Martin]

40 minutes ago, Guest Rider said:

We are a small 501(c)3 sports group that is having issues with elections. We have a few people who did not submit their membership form until a week after the meeting and did not sign into the meeting but now want to be considered has having joined at that meeting to gain voting rights in time for the December elections. Can they do that?

Barring some rule in your organization’s governing documents to the contrary, it seems to me that members should be considered to have joined at the time that they actually joined.

I would note, however, that the rules in RONR only care about whether someone is currently a member and grants all rights of membership immediately, so it doesn’t weigh in on this subject directly. If your organization has a rule which requires persons to be a member for a certain period of time in order to gain voting rights, it will ultimately be up to your society to interpret that rule.