Balloting to elect board members and officers

[Guest Sarge]

We expect nominations from the floor in addition to the candidates recommended by the Nominating Committee. How do we handle it?

[George Mervosh]

I guess "vote" would sound curt, but pass out a piece of paper and let the members write down who they want to elect.

[Tim Wynn]

We expect nominations from the floor in addition to the candidates recommended by the Nominating Committee. How do we handle it?

After the report of the nominating committee, the chair should call for further nominations from the floor for each office. For example, he would say, "For president, Jane Doe is nominated by the nominating committee. Are there any further nominations." If there are any, he should repeat each name that is nominated; then when there are no further nominations, he should ask again, just to be sure. Then, he should declare nominations closed. Then he moves to the next office.

See RONR(10th ed.), p. 421-422.

[Tim Wynn]

I guess "vote" would sound curt, but pass out a piece of paper and let the members write down who they want to elect.

That did sound curt, George... and a little impatient.

[Sarge]

There will be hundreds of people at the annual meeting, not all members. How do I make sure "outsiders" don't get a ballot?

[Tim Wynn]

There will be hundreds of people at the annual meeting, not all members. How do I make sure "outsiders" don't get a ballot?

A tellers committee should be appointed to handle the process of distributing and collecting the ballots. See RONR(10th ed.), p. 400-401 for suggestions in this regard.

The tellers should have a way of verifying eligibility to vote as the ballots are returned.

[David A Foulkes]

There will be hundreds of people at the annual meeting, not all members. How do I make sure "outsiders" don't get a ballot?

I would think taking the convention approach might be helpful, where voting members are seated in a separate section from others. If the tellers don't know each and every member by face, maybe they should all have name tags, or be required to wear their lodge hats during the voting.

Curious why there would be "hundreds of people" with obviously a questionably unmanageable number of non-voting people? Not just members?

[Sarge]

We have a program and dinner open to the public and invite all to stay for the business meeting. Surprisingly, many choose to stay and listen to the meeting.

[Gary Novosielski]

There will be hundreds of people at the annual meeting, not all members. How do I make sure "outsiders" don't get a ballot?

If you design your procedure properly, "outsiders" getting their hands a ballot is not cruicial. Making super counterfeit-proof ballots is probably a waste of time, too. After all, in many applications the ballot is just a blank sheet of paper. There's nothing intrinsically special about the ballot, and the less special you treat it, the better. It's who gets to hand them in that counts.

The two important points are, first, to make sure that only members can RETURN a ballot, i.e, the tellers must be able to identify who is a member and who is not, get ID from each voter--photo ID if necessary--and then have them sign or initial by their name on the master list of eligible voters to indicate that they have voted. No ballot should be accepted from someone who has voted already. If you have multiple ballot boxes because of the large turnout, divide them by family-name initial, such as A-M; N-Z. And have signs, so their name will appear at one and only one ballot box, and they know which one to go to. That way they can't put a vote in each box.

Secondly, tellers should request (insist) and visually confirm that voters fold their ballots TWICE (i.e., crosswise and lengthwise) before placing them in the ballot box. The idea is to prevent someone from casting multiple ballots by sneaking in two or three at the same time. If two ballots are folded together once, they will readily fall apart inside a ballot box and be undetected. If folded twice, they are kept together until unfolded during counting, and more readily detected (and counted as fraudulent).