On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 8:23 AM, N Michael Bashour < nicholasbashour@gmail.com> wrote:
If you have it where you add a provision to the bylaws stating that to be eligible to vote in the annual elections, all dues must be paid no later than 5 business days before the date of the annual meeting, that may fix some of the issues. Yes, you'll have to verify membership status, but wouldn't you have to do that, anyway? By having a deadline for registration tied to voting eligibility, there would be enough time to process registration and update the roster.
Again, this would have to be an amendment to the bylaws. With adequate notice and communication, however, the majority of members who would be attending the annual meeting are likely to comply with the deadline. But if you feel that anyone who wants to pay their dues at the annual meeting should be allowed to vote, then you just state that all dues must be paid by the start of the annual meeting. Late arrivals would not be eligible then, but we can't bend over backwards to accommodate every possible situation. We have to agree on a set of simple rules and we have to accept that they will not be accommodating to everyone and not everyone will like them, but that's the case with every organization that's currently in existence, with the possible exception of the Distinguished Egalitarian Society of Professional International Sectarian Existentialists (DESPISE).
I'm not opposed in principle to introducing an explicit deadline for dues payments in order to be considered a "member in good standing" at the meeting, whether that deadline is the start of the meeting, or 5 days prior, or 10 days prior, or whatever.
The practical problem with all this, however, is that making any amendment to the Bylaws at this stage requires that we have members able to vote on one. Therefore, whatever scheme for collecting dues (and thus admitting members) we want to adopt -- at least initially -- *must* work with the Bylaws as currently written.
Kirill