Dear Members (and especially our newest members),
It is time once again to ratify a piece of our Charter.
HERE IS HOW THE PROCESS WORKS
All registered members may discuss and vote in this thread.
A summary of the two Charter Articles we are voting on in this thread is given below along with a link to the full and complete text of the article.
Before voting, we discuss in this thread for a minimum of ten days. During those ten days, you should state bluntly in this thread anything you don’t like.. If enough people dislike certain provisions, we will remove them from the text before the voting begins and allow the committee to work on them again until they are more acceptable to the membership.
At the end of the discussion, the vote opens and remains open for ten days, two weekends inclusive. The vote takes the form of a poll in this thread, where you vote either yes or no to approve these pieces of the Charter.
The vote will remain open until Monday, August 8, 11:59 pm Greenwich Mean Time.
(Translation: voting from July 29, ~8:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time or ~5:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time until August 8, ~8:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time or ~5:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time. )
ARTICLE 7: Binding Votes and Initiatives of the Membership and ARTICLE 12, ¶2: Charter Amendments
The full and complete text for Binding Votes can be read IN THIS POST. The full and complete text for future Charter Amendments can be read IN THIS POST (¶2 is in large print).
I am putting both of these articles in the same discussion thread because they are both about the rules for initiating a vote and actually voting on board77. We have decided to implement a voting procedure that might seem complicated at first glance, and since it applies to both Binding Votes and ratification of Charter Amendments, I thought it best if we keep all the questions and suggestions in one thread.
If there are strong objections, and something about the voting procedure has to be removed, it will be removed from both Articles. The parts of the article that are not about voting are short so I did not think it would present a problem to ask for ratification of both in one thread.
Charter Amendments should be self-explanatory. After the original Charter committee disbands, any future changes to the Charter must be handled as amendments according to this Article. Binding Votes are votes on proposals that the board must adopt if the proposal passes. An example would be our recent vote to open the board.
We have established a regular voting cycle so that members know when to check the Business Room for voting threads. Voting is supposed to begin during the first week of the month, unless an emergency dictates otherwise (decided by the Mayor). All votes still require ten days of discussion and ten days of voting, so discussion threads will go up during the third week of a month and the voting will begin in the first week of the following month.
How Votes Get Initiated whether they are for amendments to the Charter or for something else.
Just about everything that happens here gets voted on, so we wanted to balance two concerns: (1) we want to make it easy for members to request a vote; (2) at the same time we want to avoid frivolous votes that would promote apathy.
So ... when members feel that a vote is required, instead of everyone starting their own voting thread they start a thread in the Business Room that asks for a voting committee to form. Other members must then step forward and support the call for a vote. (How many members must do that will be described in a moment.) If it is a charter amendment, then the Committee for Amendments to the Charter is formed. If it is something else, then the Committee for Binding Votes is formed. These committees are described in Article 11, which is currently up for ratification HERE, and you can read the full text of Article 11 IN THIS POST.
How many requests are needed to convene a voting committee? -
• The Mayor can convene either committee all by him/herself
• Two Rangers can convene either committee all by themselves
• Any five members asking for either committee will get it
Now, these requests allow the committee to form. The Committee must then be filled by volunteers, accepted in order until the committee is filled and has the proper composition.
Those who asked for the committee must serve on it, and both kinds of committees require one Loremaster.
A Charter Amendment Committee has seven to thirteen members - it cannot begin work with fewer than seven, and volunteers can be accepted until there are no more than thirteen. Example: if five members request a charter amendment and none of them is a Loremaster, one Loremaster must be added to the committee plus one to seven additional volunteers. If the Mayor convenes the committee on his/her own, a Loremaster plus five to eleven additional volunteers are needed.
A Binding Vote committee never has fewer than five members, and it can have as many as eleven if it has been initiated by the members. The principle is that those who called for the committee should not constitute the majority of committee members. So if the Mayor alone called the committee, a Loremaster + three members are added. If two Rangers called the committee, a Loremaster + two members are added. And if five members called the committee, a Loremaster + five members are added.
We did not specify a time limit for forming the committee and members will have to use their common sense. Until now we have accepted everyone who wanted to be on the charter committee, but people have generally joined or left at convenient stopping points. They have not wandered in and out while work was in progress. If a future Charter Amendment committee started out with seven members, and a week into the work someone new wanted to join, it would be up to the committee to decide whether they would allow that. The only regulation we have laid down is the minimum and maximum number of members.
So, the committee convenes and it is up to them to decide whether to hold the vote (if this decision must be made) and what form the ballot will take. They must conduct the discussion thread, open and close the vote on schedule, and count and report the results.
For ratifying amendments to the Charter, the committee must actually write the amendment and approve its wording before presenting it to the membership. The actual ratification vote is always a yes/no vote, like the one we are doing here. 67% of the members must vote “yes†for the amendment to be ratified.
For other kinds of votes, we have used other voting methods in the past and Article 7 officially recognizes them as legitimate. For yes/no polls, 67% supermajority is required to pass. For those votes where we add up responses for a series of options, the option with 67% aggregate support is the one that will win. And for instant runoff votes submitted by PM or email, a 51% simple majority is required to win. (Runoffs require a smaller majority because they do not, by design, yield supermajorities. Runoffs are only used when there are more than two mutually exclusive options.)
When voting is finished, any threads used by the committee to discuss and design the vote, and the thread in which members discussed and voted, will be placed in the History Forum with links inside the appropriate Directory.
Now, the tough part -- Quorum requirements
We are deeply concerned about member apathy and did not want to tie ourselves to quorum requirements so tough that no proposal would ever pass. We have done what we could by setting a routine voting schedule, requiring a Global email when the discussion goes up and when voting begins, and adding a seven-day extension if a quorum has not been reached, but the quorum itself requires that a certain number of members vote, period.
At the suggestion of IdylleSeethes (who has experience with this kind of thing) we have adopted a quorum that is determined from a running average of the percentage of active members who voted in the last seven elections.
• Active members are defined as members active over the past sixty days
• The percentage of active members voting in the last seven elections is averaged.
• 5% is deducted for the normal variance around any average.
• The resulting percentage is applied to the number of members active over 60 days prior to the current vote, and that becomes the quorum number.
All the records from prior votes needed to calculate this moving average will be kept by the Mayor in Michel Delving where the members can see them. The formula and how to use it will also be described in a step-by-step process.
At the time of a vote, the Rangers will have to:
• determines how many members have been active over the past sixty days
• someone (Mayor or Rangers) will calculate the moving average, subtract 5%, and multiply by the active members over the past sixty days
The number of members needed to make a quorum will be posted in the voting thread, along with the majority percentage needed for the proposal to pass.
That’s basically it. Don’t be shy to ask questions and to argue about the provisions of these two Articles.
In order to ratify these two Articles, 39 members must cast votes, and of those who vote, two-thirds (67%) must vote in favor.