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

[Joshua Katz]

I agree, she has done a great job laying out the issues and potential
resolutions.  That said, I agree about the working out of wording, but I
still intensely dislike it.  I dislike that the format we have selected for
business encourages informal procedures where rules don't apply.  It seems
to me to be like the idea of moving for a recess after exhausting your
right to speak, then spending the recess talking about what you want to do,
or using a recess to engage in personal attacks and other violations of
decorum while discussing a motion.  It's just a way around what is a
beautiful system for decision-making, which inherently means it leads to
less beautiful decisions.  Making decisions outside of a deliberative
 body, as you illustrate, encourages informal decision-making.  While it's
not in my benefit to point this out, even without the 'amendment' process
you mention, the lack of actual debate on motions is problematic.  For
instance, it allows me to speak, where I would not be allowed to speak at a
meeting unless my rep were absent or chose to allow me to speak.

By the way, since we have no concept of presence or absence, I'd argue that
alternates ought to be able to sponsor electronic motions, with the
provisio that the rep can take make the sponsorship.  That's pretty
unwieldy - but so is the whole process.

Joshua A. Katz

Region 8 (Region of Badassdom) Alternate
Libertarian National Committee

Chair, Libertarian Party of Connecticut


On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 10:09 AM, Scott L. <scott73 at earthlink.net> wrote:

>
>
> 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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>
>
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