So let’s talk about the logistics of these issues, because tangential neighbors / members won’t have much frame of reference until we lay out how it works on paper.
I’ll write out here how we’re operating currently in lay terms, but here is a copy of the Bylaws if anyone wants to peruse there. Someone correct me if I misspeak or leave something out:
When we take a vote on an issue, e.g. -resolution or officer/election, we don’t support that issue as an organization unless there is 60% supermajority support of those Delegates that decide to vote on the issue at hand - The bylaws only require us to consider a basic majority of the Delegates who cast a vote, and that the count of that total Delegate vote must meet a quorum. While we uphold a simple majority for a quorum, the Board of FAN agreed to rely on a supermajority threshold to support a position last year.
Tallying the Majority:
We first need a quorum of Delegates to vote on an issue and count it as a valid vote, and we count abstention votes toward that quorum.
The overall count for a majority is the total number of Delegates who cast a vote for an issue.
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Each member NA gets 1 Delegate/vote
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At-Large members get 1 Delegate/vote
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We currently don’t utilize the At-large Delegate structure and instead conduct a vote of those At-Large members. If the Vote of that block passes the supermajority 60% threshold, then we count the yes/no position as the vote toward the “Delegate” in that block.
So currently there are 11 NAs, which means there would be a maximum of 12 votes we could consider when we include the At-Large block vote. A supermajority of 12 is 7. But since some of the vote/meeting timings of member NAs who don’t utilize online voting also don’t line up with FAN vote timings, then we don’t always get that total 12 count of NA Delegates casting a vote on an issue, and in that case the supermajority is calculated based on those who do cast a vote.
A quorum is 6 of those 12 Delegates, so the smallest supermajority we would accept is 4 of those 6 Delegate votes.
Membership representation in those votes:
We don’t audit our member NA’s for a count of their memberships, but lets suppose that each NA has 20 voting members.
We are just 5 shy but for rounding, let’s say that FAN’s At-Large member count is 300.
So even in the case where 6 Delegates cast their vote, and 5 of them are NAs that would mean that (5*20) 100 members are represented by the 5 separate NA votes. then 300 members are represented by the 1 At-large block vote.