A thread to discuss naming threads, board policy, new thread suggestions, and anything else that has to do with board administration and maintenance. Guaranteed to include lively debate and polls. Natter discouraged, but not deleted.
Current Stompy Feet: ita, Jon B, DXMachina, P.M. Marcontell, Liese S., amych
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.
Yeah, obviously you cannot round up a quorum online. I just thought you guys wanted to set a minimum number of votes for passage, and a quorum to me has always been, apparently incorrectly, a majority of voting members, as opposed to a majority among the ones who bother to vote that day.
I personally think that both the quorum AND the abstention thing are too complicated for our purposes.
The only draback to not having a quorum is that you could change something with only 1 or 2 people. However, I would hope that people who felt against something would not be apathetic and vote against it!
so does the tallyer stay the same? Is it always jengod? Is it the person who wants the votes (this is where I worry)? Do we seek out a neutral party?
Ultimately, we'll have an automated polling system. Until then, I think it shouldn't always be Jengod (unless she really wants to), and it certainly shouldn't be the person who made the motion.
