[Lnc-business] Email Ballot 2014-10: Oregon Resolution v2

[Scott L.]

The Secretary makes several very good points in her e-mail below.

 

You can increase the chance of getting your pet motion passed via an e-mail
ballot if you post a tentative version of it, and then let LNC members
propose amendments for 3 or 4 days before posting your final version and
asking for co-sponsors.  

 

By doing that, you can very roughly approximate the debate that occurs at an
in-person meeting.

  Scott Lieberman

 

 

 

 

"Joshua,

It's not that there's something you don't understand about email ballots.
Rather, you do understand it, and you are finding the process to be
inadequate for you to exercise all the options available to you in a
face-to-face meeting.  This is precisely why RONR says conducting business
by email is not the same as a "deliberative body" as discussed in RONR, and
it puts us into uncharted parliamentary territory.  There are a lot of
timing issues in provisions which allow people to exercise their membership
rights in RONR, and email ballots just aren't adequate to allow for that.
Things that are controversial are best handled in actual meetings where we
can amend, where points of order can be raised in a timely manner, and where
all those details can be handled before we vote on the motion.  But this is
the process we have been given.

I share some of your questions about whether this motion is in order.

If a point of order is quickly raised on an email ballot, and the chair
promptly replies to say the point is well taken and the motion is out of
order, well then we can just stop the email ballot to approximate how it
would be handled in a meeting.  Then if 4 people want to start a mail ballot
to appeal the ruling, they can do that, and if their appeal is successful,
we restart the original motion.

In this case, I strongly suspect that the Chair would not agree that the
motion is out of order.  There's no hard-coded process for how the LNC can
dispute that and be sure to finish that question before the original email
ballot ends, much less before voting starts on it.  I debated whether to ask
for a ruling on this motion, but it would be dragging us through such a
messy process, and the LNC had already once decided that a similar motion
was in order, so I decided that in this case I'd just count on people to
vote no if they think it's out of order.

As to the question about what constitutes a session when we're doing email
ballots, since we're in RONR la-la land with email ballots, the best we can
do is attempt to find guidance in parallel concepts.  It's just guidance to
attempt to do justice to the RONR concepts, but I can't argue those parallel
concepts to be binding rules.  Since a session is the duration of a single
adopted agenda, and we don't adopt agendas for the time in between our
face-to-face sessions, my opinion would be that we could view each email
ballot as its own session, an agenda of one single item.

For those who aren't necessarily versed in the implications of a session,
Joshua's point is that once a motion is defeated, it cannot be renewed
(offered again for a vote on the same question) for the duration of that
session (agenda) except through a motion to reconsider.  It could be brought
up again in the next session on a newly adopted agenda if the board agreed
to put it on the agenda again.

 

If each email ballot is viewed as its own session, it means that even if
Dan's motion were viewed as substantially the same question, he could still
introduce the motion in a separate email ballot after the first one failed.
The fact that some who voted no on the first motion are now sponsoring the
second motion argues that they see it as a substantially different question,
though.

Viewing each email ballot as its own session also means that in theory, a
group of co-sponsors could repeatedly bring up the exact same verbatim
question over and over again by back-to-back email ballots, hoping for an
eventual different result.  That's in theory.  In reality, though, that is
not likely to be an effective tactic.  It would just make the rest of the
board really annoyed and instead result in an increasing number of no votes
to express the annoyance.  Eventually the chair would likely say it's
dilatory and rule the subsequent motions out of order, and the LNC would
thank him for doing that and back him up if there were an appeal about it.

 

  Alicia"



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