<div dir="ltr">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.<div>
<br></div><div>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.<br>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div dir="ltr">Joshua A. Katz<div><br></div><div>Region 8 (Region of Badassdom) Alternate</div><div>Libertarian National Committee</div><div><br>Chair, Libertarian Party of Connecticut</div>
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<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 10:09 AM, Scott L. <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:scott73@earthlink.net" target="_blank">scott73@earthlink.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><font color="black" face="Verdana"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black">The Secretary makes several
very good points in her e-mail below.<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><font color="black" face="Verdana"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black">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. <u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><font color="black" face="Verdana"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black">By doing that, you can
very roughly approximate the debate that occurs at an in-person meeting.<br>
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Scott Lieberman</span></font><font face="Verdana"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana"><u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><font size="3" color="black" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">“</span></font>Joshua,</p><div class=""><br>
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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.<u></u><u></u></div><p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">I share some of your
questions about whether this motion is in order.<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">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.<br>
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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.<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">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.<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">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.<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">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.<br>
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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.<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><font size="3" color="black" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black"> </span></font>Alicia<font color="black"><span style="color:black">”</span></font><br>
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