Dissenting Opinion

DRAFT OF THE DISSENTING OPINION I INTEND TO PRESENT ON THE CONVENTION USA FLOOR TONIGHT. IF YOU WISH TO SIGN THIS DISSENT, COMMENT BELOW.

Dissent of the Published Rules.

I have three grounds for objecting to the report of the rules committee, the third of which is a serious flaw that motivates my recommending that the published rules be voted against. The first is procedural and would have remained in the committee records, except for the serious flaw.  The second is substantive and would have been reserved for referring to the rules committee after the report of the rules committee was set for a vote, except for the serious flaw. The third is a serious flaw in the rules themselves.

PROCEDURE
The rules committee voted on a draft version of the rules, and established a procedure for proposing amendments and adopting them. Proposals were submitted, received enough support that they should have been adopted, but were amended without the prior consent of the original author, without any vote, and without instruction from the committee chairman. This was appealed to the chairman of the committee, who did not respond to the appeal.

In particular this would have addressed the serious flaw listed below.

RULES INCOMPLETE
No process was available to bring before the rules committee anything other than a change to the rules as written. In particular, a proposal first submitted to the members of the Rules Committee on September 18th would have had the rules committee consider the portion of Section 9 of Robert’s Rules of Order dedicated to dealing with the concerns of electronic meetings. The rules are lacking due to omitting clarification on one or more of the concerns listed on page 99 of the 11th edition.

* the type of computer equipment or computer software required for participation in meetings, whether the organization must provide such equipment or software, and contingencies for technical difficulties or malfunctions;
* methods for determining the presence of a quorum;
* the conditions under which a member may raise a point of order doubting the presence of a quorum, and the conditions under which the continued presence of a quorum is presumed if no such point of order is raised;
* methods for seeking recognition and obtaining the floor;
* means by which motions may be submitted in writing during a meeting; and
* methods for taking and verifying votes.

I stipulate that without considering these concerns, an electronic meeting can not claim to be following RRO.

CRITICAL FLAW
To amend these rules it is required that 26 states vote for the amendment. Based on a 20% voter participation rate, we would be lucky to have delegates from 29 states vote on any motion. Further, states may be split.

A 60-15 vote among delegates with 25 states for, 1 state against and three states split would be far more support than any yes-no vote taken for this convention so far, yet could not amend the rules as written.

It is for this reason that I recommend rejecting the rules as published.

Proposed discussion topics

This post is intended to allow Delegates to provide motions they would like to have discussed once this blog is called to order. If a discussion item is seconded, I will produce a new post on that discussion item.

Please do not discuss ideas that have been presented at this time.

Call to Order

I will call this blog to order when a quorum of seven committee members have reported by responding to this post with their name and delegate ID.

The first order of business will be securing the authorization from the Committee Chairman to convene using this format and selecting an impartial delegate to steer this proceeding.

Comments on the blog setup may be discussed in the post "Let's give it a try!"

Let's give it a try!

This is a test of the possibility of creating a committee blog for Convention USA. The moderation settings are set up to allow anyone to read the blog and comments, but only comments by members of the blog are allowed.

Thus by maintaining the members of the blog as the members of the committee, this solution should provide ease of communication. This also would allow the blog moderators (ideally committee officers) to establish separate posts to discuss ideas in parallel.

I am uncertain about the process of requestiong to be a member, so let's give it a try!