Voting

[Guest Sue]

To accommodate parents' busy schedules, we are offering two meeting times for our monthly PTA (Parent Teacher Association) meeting - one on Monday morning and one on Monday night. We will have the same agenda at each meeting. How should voting be handled?

[Josh Martin]

To accommodate parents' busy schedules, we are offering two meeting times for our monthly PTA (Parent Teacher Association) meeting - one on Monday morning and one on Monday night. We will have the same agenda at each meeting. How should voting be handled?

Such "shift meetings" cannot be properly used at all unless there are appropriate provisions in the Bylaws to authorize them and define how they work. See this article for more information.

[Guest Sue]

Such "shift meetings" cannot be properly used at all unless there are appropriate provisions in the Bylaws to authorize them and define how they work. See this article for more information.

Thank you Josh. Clearly, we will have to mull this over!

[Guest Greg B]

I thought there would be an easy answer. Yes or no.

Picture if you will a church with 3 services. At the end of each service, they are going to call a meeting to order to vote on the budget. The budget motion is not fixed. They are trusting that a person will not vote more than once. Motions to amend will be allowed. There are no provisions in the bylaws defining shift meetings.

The vote is by ballot and after the 3rd service all ballots will be counted.

Is this out of order with Robert's Rules?

[Guest Edgar]

I thought there would be an easy answer. Yes or no.

Duplicate post.

[Gary Novosielski]

I thought there would be an easy answer. Yes or no.

Picture if you will a church with 3 services. At the end of each service, they are going to call a meeting to order to vote on the budget. The budget motion is not fixed. They are trusting that a person will not vote more than once. Motions to amend will be allowed. There are no provisions in the bylaws defining shift meetings.

The vote is by ballot and after the 3rd service all ballots will be counted.

Is this out of order with Robert's Rules?

Yes.

Suppose the proposal was amended at the second meeting. All the votes at the first meeting would be meaningless, since they approved a different motion than the one voted on at the second meeting, and the amendment could very likely have caused many people to have voted differently.

But as far as "trusting" a person not to vote more than once: Don't.

If the vote is by ballot, voting more than once should be made impossible. If you simply have a roster of members and check off the names of members as they cast their ballots, nobody would be able to vote more than once. In fact, if you are using a polling place with a ballot box, this should be standard procedure even when there is a single meeting. How else could you guard against people making multiple trips to the ballot box?

Don't create the temptation to violate the rules by making it too easy to do so. Trust is a wonderful thing, but it's seldom used in the same sentence as "election".