Rules around 2/3 vote requirement calculation

[Guest Richard]

If a 2/3 majority vote is required and the results are 66.2% does that meet the required 2/3 majority by rounding up to 67%?

[Atul Kapur]

No. 

Just like there's no crying in baseball, there's no rounding in parliamentary procedure.

Don't try to convert it to a percentage. Just look at the fraction. Is the affirmative vote at least 2/3 of the total? A trick is to see if the affirmative vote is at least twice the negative vote.

And, while it doesn't matter to the parliamentary question, immediately fire the "mathematician" who is trying to tell you that 66.2 rounds to 67 rather than to 66.

Edited June 29, 2023 at 02:25 PM by Atul Kapur

[Gary Novosielski]

On 6/29/2023 at 10:16 AM, Guest Richard said:

If a 2/3 majority vote is required and the results are 66.2% does that meet the required 2/3 majority by rounding up to 67%?

No.

The result must be such that at least two thirds have voted in the affirmative.  So the only question is whether it is, or is not.

In this case it is not.  

The rule is easily checked by taking the number of Yes and No votes, do no division, no mutiplication, no rounding (especially incompetent rounding), doubling the No votes, and seeing whether the Yes votes reach or exceed that number.  Try that on your test data, and you will find that the motion was rejected.

Incidentally the use of the phrase two-thirds majority is deprecated.  A majority vote and a two-thirds vote have very different meanings.

[Shmuel Gerber]

On 6/29/2023 at 10:21 AM, Atul Kapur said:

And, while it doesn't matter to the parliamentary question, immediately fire the "mathematician" who is trying to tell you that 66.2 rounds to 67 rather than to 66.

May as well round up to 100% and make it unanimous.