Re: Recording votes

[Jon Bosak <bosak@boethius.eng.sun.com>]

| However, this procedure works only in person, or if no one votes
| no, as on the phone you can't "count".

Right.

My reading of Robert's on voting is that what matters is whether
something passes, not by how much or by whom (unless the members vote
to record a roll call).  The process described in Robert's is one in
which the chair goes only so far as needed to establish whether there
is a majority: first by viva voce, and if that doesn't work then by a
show of hands or by standing, and if that doesn't work then by
splitting up the room and appointing tellers.  In phone conferences we
have no choice but to poll the members, but it seems to me that this
is a logical extension of the escalation needed to determine the
existence of majority, not a device for putting names on record.

The point of having a separate motion for a Division of the Assembly
is that putting names on record is something that the assembly has to
decide to do as something over and above deciding the issue being
voted on.

| So, on the phone, when the chair asks if no one objects and no one
| answers, we're cool.  How do we manage a phone vote if the
| committee is divided?  Perhaps we need to adopt a rule requiring a
| ballot (role call) without requiring names to be recorded.

My reading is that what we've been doing is not a ballot or a roll
call but rather a device necessitated by the medium for
determining the existence of a majority.  The information that we
gain as members by listening to a phone poll is exactly what we
could establish visually by looking at a show of hands if we were
meeting in person.  So in my opinion, the fact that we know who
voted on which side of a question should no more affect whether
the names are recorded in the minutes of a phone conference than
it would in a face-to-face meeting.

Jon