Very serious concerns. I am going to vote and work. That’s it. I’m not going to respond to emotional yells. Everyone vote your conscience. My priority is fundamental rights. I am not going to deviate from that for appearances. I am not going to deviate from that for anything. I am ignoring the rest. I am ignoring social media. It is our job to ensure rights are not violated. Timing of motions, who’s getting elected or re elected or who is upset are not my concern. The votes will go as they may. And I will do my job. But I will not violate member rights. Period. We’ve let the chair get away with murder. Some of us wrote a letter in October. It was largely ignored. I’m not going to let member rights be violated. If you are not talking about rights save your breath with me. I’ve let myself get distracted from that. No more. If you’re not dealing with rights leave me out of it. On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 12:28 AM Alicia Mattson via Lnc-business < lnc-business@hq.lp.org> wrote:
Our platform demands that the constitution not be suspended in times of war, and the Platform Committee is proposing to add other conditions to that. The LNC is currently voting on a motion to say that emergencies are not a legitimate reason to violate rights. How can the LNC, then, facilitate what is clearly going to be a bulldozing of delegate rights with this online convention plan?
There were many delegates who were unable to attend tonight's online event, so I need to share some information that was given.
First recall that Zoom has a meeting mode, and it has a webinar mode. In meeting mode, participants can see who else is present, can see whose hands are raised, and NORMALLY have mic/video rights, as it is designed for a more deliberative process. In webinar mode, it's designed to be one-way information, presenter gives info and the rest are passive observers, and it is not designed for a deliberative process for group decisions. We can't tell who else is or is not present. We can't see whose hands are raised or whether the chair is recognizing people in the order in which hands were raised. We are locked in isolation cages and can only speak when someone else gives us permission.
Tonight it was explained that in meeting mode, Zoom has an absolute maximum capacity of 1000 participants. We have 1046 delegates, so the platform which has been chosen is not capable of hosting all of our delegates. This is a serious matter when we're talking about duly elected delegates being prevented from attending the meeting because they're one of the last 46 to arrive.
The chair indicated we would use meeting mode for the Friday night credentialing and agenda process, but then when it came time for elections, he would put us into webinar mode because it can handle up to 3000 participants.
Remember webinar mode from the first test run? Remember all my comments about how that violates the fundamental requirements for simultaneous aural communication among all participants, noted on page ONE of RONR? I thought we were past that possibility when the second test run was put into meeting mode, and we were allowed to control our own mics.
Webinar mode means you have no means of raising a point of order or other privileged motion in a timely manner. This is also a very serious fundamental rights issue. If our rules are violated, and we can't immediately act to alert the assembly to the problem and have it corrected, it's a huge problem. Some mistake made impacting a candidate's status? Election results are incorrect? Delegates who are for some reason unable to enter the meeting to exercise their rights to vote? Can't open your mic to say anything.
For tonight's trial we were actually in meeting mode, but the account admins had chosen to take away our microphone controls even in meeting mode!!
Under these conditions, delegate rights are subject to the whims of a chair who has, more and more lately, demonstrated that he doesn't give a flip about the rights of members to speak in meetings. I am not going to surrender my rights as a member to such a chair.
Tonight we practiced with debate over the silly subject of whether hot dogs are sandwiches. How did that go? The motions and debate were funny, however there were numerous procedural violations. The Chair refused to designate any particular means by which a delegate could raise a point of order. He sorta suggested maybe we could flash icons or something but then refused to pay attention to such signals.
There were various causes for points of order: debate not germane to the motion, the motions being misstated as completely different things than were moved, the polls being put up for voting also containing the wrong motion, too many amendments pending at a time, etc. These are all things that need someone to say something immediately, but we couldn't.
We were left trying all sorts of novel things to get attention: flash various icons repeatedly, physically wave our hands on our video, hold up notes to our cameras. Nothing worked. All we could do was raise our hands to get in line to speak with non-privileged priority...which took 20 minutes. Oh, and if in the meantime we tried flashing yes/no/coffee/fast/slow icons, Zoom put our hand down and took us out of the waiting line to speak. At one point when I had a hand up for a point of order, a faceless admin pulled me out of the main hall and put me into the credentialing room, which also lost my place in the speaking queue.
When several people eventually got to speak after waiting forever to raise points of order the chair was very dismissive about the inability to exercise our rights to raise privileged motions. He clearly didn't care and wasn't going to see that any mechanism was implemented. Instead we were treated to the chair whining that: -privileged motions annoy him -privileged motions are "a giant pain in the ass" -he doesn't know a right way to get a privileged motion to bubble up -it's tricky, and I don't have an answer -and maybe if someone put up the coffee cup icon he could somehow send the parliamentarian to "deal with the individual."
It was callous disregard for delegate rights to call attention to potentially serious problems, and it was clear he doesn't WANT to allow us to do that.
I'm also going to say it out loud that by the end of it, the chair was drunk and slurring words.
Is this how this board is going to allow the selection of our Presidential and Vice-Presidential nominees to proceed? With a chair hostile to delegate rights just gaveling through? We owe better to our members.
All of this is on top of the MANY, MANY complaints we are getting about delegates not having received the notices/links, not being able to enter the room, etc. All the other execution problems are also serious, but to me are secondary to the reality that the chair intends to bulldoze all of us.
The chair keeps saying that we will try to follow our existing rules as closely as possible. In this meeting, he declared that election voting will just be each delegation figuring out for themselves how to vote, and they can do it any way they want, and then these 51 sets of results get submitted. (By the way, the Secretary has been told that these votes will first go through staff and not even be submitted directly to her...there should NOT be a middle-man!!) In the meeting I pointed out that our Convention Rule 10 requires these delegation votes to be by written ballot, and the individual ballots submitted for tellers to double-check the tallies. I asked how this plan is compliant with our rules. I explained the reason this rule exists is that we have discovered MANY, MANY errors in delegation tallies, and we need double-checking to minimize the chances of announcing incorrect election results. The chair was dismissive, oh well, we'll do our best...
It is important that delegate votes be counted properly, and these are not issues that we can afford to take lightly.
I'm not unsympathetic to the couple of states with early deadlines, but we just need to use lawyers and fight for judicial relief in those states. Why is that not already being done anyway?
-Alicia
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On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 9:36 PM Caryn Ann Harlos via Lnc-business < lnc-business@hq.lp.org> wrote:
We have an electronic mail ballot.
Votes are due to the LNC-Business list by May 20 2020 at 11:59:59 pm Pacific time.
Co-Sponsors: Bilyeu, Harlos, Hewitt, Mattson, Smith
=============================================
Motion: Rescind in its entirety the motion adopted during the May 9, 2020 LNC
meeting, which called for a convention to begin on May 22, 2020 with
business conducted online. Instead, in accordance with Bylaw Article 10.1,
the LNC calls an in-person convention to occur during the dates of July
8-12, 2020 at Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Florida.
=============================================
THRESHOLD REQUIRED:
You can keep track of the Secretary's manual tally of votes here: https://tinyurl.com/ballot200513-1. Votes are noted with a link to the actual ballot cast for verification. You can find the time that the manual tally was last updated at the bottom of the sheet.
Please notify me of any discrepancies.
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