[Lnc-business] Secretary''s Report

[Alicia Mattson]

Ms. Harlos has made some demonstrably false complaints against me in her
secretary’s report.

On September 4, 2018 I sent Ms. Harlos an email with the subject line
“miscellaneous forms” and attached the source documents for the ballot
template (which I call a tally sheet), the motion template, as well as
other forms for her use.   She replied to confirm receipt.  While we’re all
together in Miami this weekend I can log into my email and show this email
in my “sent” box to any of my colleagues who wish to witness it.

In another thread on this list she has now acknowledged that I “may have
provided” the motion template that her report accuses me of withholding
from her.  In that other thread she goes on to acknowledge that among other
documents, I did provide her with the sample election tally sheet…but then
two sentences later claims I have not given her the “individual state
ballot sheets given to the delegation chairs.”  Those are one and the same
document.  There’s not another one.  That’s the template that I use to
generate the sheets given to the state chairs for submitting their election
tallies.

Early this term, everyone on the LNC received a copy of vote tabulation
spreadsheets that I sent to this email list with details of the At-Large
and Judicial Committee elections, back when Ms. Harlos was falsely accusing
me of having allegedly “screwed” a region 1 candidate in a “suspect”
election, and accusing my job performance of making the party look worse
than Arvin Vohra did.  Even if I hadn’t sent that file to a public email
list, it’s a column for each affiliate and a row for each candidate, with
totals.  At convention, I just put the totals on a different sheet so that
the totals aren’t visible to the audience while we are reviewing the data
entry on screen.

I don’t use any different forms or spreadsheet templates for audits.  I
included Ms. Harlos as a teller for the tally of the Judicial Committee
results after adjournment of the 2018 convention, so she saw first-hand
that the tellers checked the delegation chairs’ work on the very same tally
sheets that the delegation chairs used, not on a different form.  If I do
additional audits later, I grab a standard college-ruled piece of notebook
paper and tally on that.

After the 2018 Judicial Committee tellers completed their review of the
numbers submitted by state chairs, we couldn’t entice Ms. Harlos away from
her phone to observe the tally sheets for the Judicial Committee being
entered into the spreadsheet.  Texting or social media was more important
to her than on-the-job training with real data when she had the chance.

Even prior to this term, when I have made genuine attempts to give her
useful advice to help avoid certain pitfalls, she has opted to ignore my
advice and run headlong into the pitfall.

In the appendices to past convention minutes, I have published reports
about the types of mistakes that can easily occur during convention
elections.  That's useful advice to tell a secretary to watch for those
things.

While the secretary is required to publish delegate allocations, it is not
required that the secretary build an entire education/training manual for
delegation chairs called the Delegation Chairs Manual.  That was a personal
project that I also did for the 2014 convention though I was not even a
member of the LNC that term.  Yes, it does contain another copy of the
delegate allocations, and various bylaw/rule citations, but it also
contains material that I wrote from scratch based on my personal experience
at conventions, my personal parliamentary knowledge, etc.  I intend to
continue to update it and provide that service again this year.

No, I did not hand that over to Ms. Harlos when she demanded that I do so.
Her report sounds like she intends to copy my work from a training manual
that I produced and instead attach her own name to it.  Classy.

No, I did not create new materials for her when she requested that I
provide her a listing of dates and deadlines for this LNC term.  There
aren’t that many.  They are easily found in the bylaws and policy manual.
If she needs to build some sort of deadline calculator rather than simply
reading the text of the rule, then she can do that for herself, but I’m not
going to agree that I should have built her a spreadsheet to calculate the
last day of the sixth month prior to date X.  It's pretty easy to count it
off on your fingers.

This secretary’s report demonstrates that she does possess the
widely-distributed tables of 2018 data that she alleges I have withheld
from her.  If she didn’t have it, she couldn’t have copied its data into
her report.

Ms. Harlos seems determined to give people the false impression that I have
somehow crippled her ability to prepare for convention, and if I don’t call
that out, some people might be fooled into believing it.  I do not enjoy
these arguments, but I will not agree to be her silent scape goat.

I continue to be baffled by a person who assured the delegates that she had
the skills to do the job, and now shamelessly complains over and over that
she needs extensive training.

If the secretary believes it is appropriate to use her meeting reports to
smear me, then would it be appropriate for me to submit an at-large rep
report to defend myself in the same forum?  Does that sound like what we
should be putting in the minutes?  Perhaps it’s better to instead just
delete the inappropriate material from the secretary’s report and call it a
day.

-Alicia


On Sun, Nov 10, 2019 at 7:10 PM Caryn Ann Harlos via Lnc-business <
lnc-business at hq.lp.org> wrote:

> Attached
>
> *  In Liberty,*
> * Personal Note:  I have what is commonly known as Asperger's Syndrome
> (part of the autism spectrum).  This can affect inter-personal
> communication skills in both personal and electronic arenas.  If anyone
> found anything offensive or overly off-putting (or some other social faux
> pas) in an actual email, please contact me privately and let me know.  *
>