I understand that, Hec. My question, however, is wasn't that what was being tossed around?

There are no concrete answers for John, so I'm going for the tone of the discussion.

Ok, I think I misunderstood what you were asking.

My feeling is that there's some chomping at the bit to decide on things like the discussion thread and settle any questions of percentages/time limits that may come up after this vote. Procedural stuff, IOW.

I happy with the "no concrete answers" thing, really. I'm just kind of thinking aloud to make sure I'm seeing it the way others are seeing it.

The quorum and abstension (sp? brain gone) thing will be easier to define, once we have the results of this first ballot. For the first ballot, because we don't have a higher majority thing established, because it's just going to be counted by simple majority, if someone abstains, it doesn't really matter or count towards or against anything. But as Gar said, it should be published. We can refine what it means for the rest of the ballots in light of this ballot, and it will get easier.

I voted but it told me that I had an invalid email address. Should I vote again or does that just mean it won't email my selections to my own self?

Some small percentage of that 800 is double registrations, right? There are the people who have a separate id for Sang Sacre?

As David said, the number of separate Sang Sacre IDs is small, around ten, total. There are also a few people on the user list who have registered more than once because they didn't like their original user name, or they mis-typed it, or forgot both it and their password, so they registered again, and sometimes again, until they got it right. There are also some deactivated accounts.

ETA: And there are also some accounts that have never been activated.

I voted but it told me that I had an invalid email address. Should I vote again or does that just mean it won't email my selections to my own self?

Megan, turns out the form has a problem with punctuation in the user name. What you can do is type you e-mail address in the other "e-mail address" box, and resubmit. It should work then.

Just to clarify what I learned from Roberts Rules of Order (whch we don't have to use-- we can use abstentions in any way we like!):

1. Abstentions do not count into the vote. They are the same as nothing. However Roberts Rules of order is for things like boards, where everyone there is expected to vote.

2. Whether or not abstentions count toward quora(?) has to do with how your by laws are written. RROH says that if you say that X # of people have to be PRESENT in order for a motion to pass, abstentians count toward quora. If you say x # of members need to VOTE in order for something to pass, it does not. Their argument is that the "PRESENT" is incorrect and it should always be a quora of voters.

I would think that HERE abstentions count to show you are PRESENT and listening. As someone pointed out-- they are showing voter turnout. Depending on your POV and whether or not we end up with quora, it seems like it is up to us to decide how we count.

Also, it seems like a lot of people who are on boards don't know what to do.

if you search here:

[link]

for questions about abstentions, you find a lot of them.

I fixed the user-name-has-punctuation bug in the voting form.

Maybe this has been discussed and I missed it. Sorry if that's the case.

Is not a "quorum" used in order to ensure that a vote cannot be taken at all without the participation of a majority of members? I believe that's the case. So it would take 51 Senators in the US Senate for there to be a quorum and for a vote to be allowed to take place.

Obviously there are not really 800 active Buffistas. But if a quorom is to be insituted, at some point we must determine how many active voting Buffistas there are. Perhaps that could be however many people actually vote in this first round of voting.

Say 150 Buffistas register votes for the current issues. Then, if we accepted that number as the total number of Buffistas who want to actively participate, then a true quorum be 76.

Now if you want to say that as long as 10 Buffistas vote, then a vote counts, that's fine. But that is not a quorum. That would simply be an arbitrary minimum that we have established, not a quorum.