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.

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?

In Toastmasters International, if we had a meeting without a quorum we would still vote upon matters on occasion, but they had to be ratified by a valid quorum at a future meeting to take effect.

Not such an issue here. Some things, such as apologies and accepting the previous minutes, had to be voted upon in that meeting. Otherwise it's really doubling the effort. But a quorum determines the validity of proceedings; it doesn't prevent any vote being taken.

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.

A quorum isn't definitionally 'half plus one'. It is, simply, the number that the body in question has (arbitrarily) decided needs to be present for proceedings to be valid. So if we decide that number is 10 members, then 10 members is our true quorum.

Learn something new every day. I work with a lot Town Councils and such, and voting all requires a majority of members. Didn't realize it could be otherwise.

Nevermind.

t looks sheepish

Some of the discussion about rounding up people to make a quorum leads me to ask this,

when a vote is being taken, who can see

1) the number who have voted
2) where the vote stands?

msbelle-- Right now, just the person counting the votes (jengod).

I think this may be one of the things we have to deal with after we decide whether or not we are going to proceed with voting

when a vote is being taken

You mean during? No one, save the tallyer who should stay mum, I hope, which is why I don't get the rounding up a quorum question either.