By the way, I was attempting to raise a point of order about this matter in the Q&A box, which is where we were instructed to raise privileged motions, but it was never addressed by the chair. From my limited-by-admins perspective, it felt like I was being ignored. I am told by my delegation chair who could see the Q&A that it had lots of other posts in it, and it could have been lost in the noise. The Q&A box tonight was a mystery that I noted, and others noted, but there was never a good explanation for the selective/restricted view that the participants had of that information. Out of all the traffic that was apparently in the Q&A box, I only ever saw about 15 seemingly-random items posted by others. I have no idea what the rhyme or reason was for which things I could or couldn't see. -Alicia On Fri, May 15, 2020 at 9:43 PM Alicia Mattson <alicia.mattson@lp.org> wrote:
I need to point out something important from the Election Buddy voting software which was demonstrated during tonight's test run.
RONR p. 263 notes that it is "a fundamental principle of parliamentary law that the right to vote is limited to the members of an organization who are actually present at the time the vote is taken in a regular or properly called meeting."
Yet the Election Buddy vote conducted during tonight's test sent ballots to all delegates, not just those who were actually present in the meeting. The shared screens weren't visible for that long for me to catch the details, but it probably also went to the alternates in addition to the delegates, since the one emailed to us earlier today had over 1300 recipients and not just 1046.
Obviously in a live scenario, it must be limited to only whoever was present and eligible to vote at that time, which could be a blend of delegates and alternates.
Again I'm going to emphasize that Convention Rule 10 requires that when votes are submitted by delegation, the delegates must vote with written ballots which are submitted so as to constitute an audit trail. The chair's instructions on these test runs for delegation chairs to collect their votes however they wish is not compliant with our rules. We'll have no audit trail when it's being done 51 different ways.
Since we're being placed in webinar mode, I have no way of knowing whether there are 2 or 30 delegates present at the meeting from any given affiliate. Only a delegation chair knows. This plan makes it VERY EASY for a theoretically naughty delegation chair (not mine - 'cause Mimi is awesome and trustworthy!!) to stuff extra votes into the submitted tallies without anyone noticing.
-Alicia