On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 10:46 AM, Nicholas Michael Bashour <nicholasbashour@gmail.com> wrote:
> Some members will presumably have paid their dues prior to the meeting.
> Would they also receive ballots at the meeting (which will presumably
> require checking IDs, etc.)?
That's a non-issue in this case, anyway. If you have rolling
memberships, you'll have people who will pay their dues at the meeting
and people who paid their dues the month before or eight months before
or eleven months before. On a rolling-membership basis, someone whose
membership expires the day after the annual meeting would then
technically be eligible to vote.
Under the annual membership platform, the earliest you can pay your
dues for the current year is at the annual meeting. That way, everyone
who's at the annual meeting will be paying dues. You can't have paid
it before then. And since proxy voting is not allowed, per the bylaws,
you have to be in attendance at the meeting anyway.
So we're not going to allow renewals prior to the meeting at all? This will be quite inconvenient for anyone that wants to pay by, say, credit card (unless we set up the necessary infrastructure to accept those payments in person), as well as for anyone who happens to arrive to the meeting late (at which point the officers responsible for collecting the dues will be otherwise occupied).
More problematically, it means that the treasurer will potentially walk out of the meeting carrying the entire membership's dues in cash. This doesn't strike me as a particularly good idea, for any number of reasons.
> Or seven write-in candidates, for that matter. Since, in principle, the act
> of nomination takes place at the meeting, would we incur any legal risk from
> issuing ballots that contain only a subset of candidates, and requiring
> write-in votes for the others?
>
The bylaws don't state that candidates have to be nominated at the
annual meeting, only that they get elected then. The board can vote to
create and appoint a nomination committee 1-3 months before the
election. Interested candidates can submit candidacy to the committee.
You can leave room for write-in candidates on the ballot, or amend the
bylaws to state that only those who were members in the previous year
are eligible to run for a board position for the following year.
Fair enough; we could certainly adopt a rule to have a nominating committee or something else of that sort to streamline the nomination process. This will, however, require a vote of the entire membership, which should ideally be conducted prior to the annual meeting.
Kirill