nominations

[Guest Liddy]

We had our nominations and no one excepted the nomination for VP or secretary. We will be having our elections on the 9th of this month. what do we do if no one wants to fill these positions?

[Tim Wynn]

We had our nominations and no one excepted the nomination for VP or secretary. We will be having our elections on the 9th of this month. what do we do if no one wants to fill these positions?

Depending on the language of your bylaws, the current vice-president and secretary will possibly continue to serve until a successor is elected. Its hard to guess why no one is willing to serve. There may be many reasons. You should make it clear to all that the organization needs someone to serve in these roles. If no one cares, it may be a sign that interest in the organization has waned beyond repair.

[Chris Harrison]

We had our nominations and no one excepted the nomination for VP or secretary. We will be having our elections on the 9th of this month. what do we do if no one wants to fill these positions?

Depending on how the bylaws are worded one of two things will happen:

1) The current VP and Secretary will continue to serve until someone is elected to the office.

2) Whenever the term of office for the VP and Secretary ends the offices will fall vacant and you will have no VP or Secretary.

See RONR pp. 556-557 for details on the bylaw wording.

If the President is not at the meeting and there is no VP a Chair pro tem can be elected to preside (RONR p. 437) and a Secretary pro tem can be elected if there is no Secretary (RONR p. 443). Note the pro tems only function during the meetings so any extra-meeting duties will not fall to a pro tem and you would need to delegate those duties to another member if the bylaws permits it. I would suggest that you all do whatever is humanly possible to get someone to agree to serve.

[Gary Novosielski]

We had our nominations and no one [ac]cepted the nomination for VP or secretary. We will be having our elections on the 9th of this month. what do we do if no one wants to fill these positions?

At the time of the election, ask for nominations from the floor, one more time.

And even without nominations, you can still hold the election (in fact you must, if they bylaws say so). Just use blank ballots for the blank positions, and let people write in names. You may end up with an incomplete election, but at least you will have obeyed your bylaws instead of ignoring them.

And sometimes, people who will not run if nominated will serve if elected.

The fact is though, that if nobody is willing to accept leadership positions, it may be time to start planning the dissolution of the society. And starting those discussions can often nudge people into stepping forward.