Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Bylaws Proposal - Eliminate Platform Retention Voting

I'll be posting my LNC Meeting Report here over the next couple days, since I have to finish it by my Friday deadline for LFA. But now that I have your attention, I also want to start serializing the various proposals of the Bylaws Committee to get that discussion going. We welcome any feedback or suggestions for improvement, either in the comments or by private email to seanhaugh@mindspring.com. There's also a link to the right for the Bylaws Committee message archive where you can see all the deliberations. Within the next week or so we should also have a dedicated message board in place where party members can engage in conversation about our proposals or even suggest your own.

The rest of this post was written by Geoff Neale and appeared in the August LP News:

Proposal 1: Eliminate the Platform Retention Voting.

Check out our current Bylaws, and you will see that there is a very complicated process mandated for the review of every plank in our Platform. It is called the Platform Retention Vote. The intention of this process was to provide a simple mechanism for our members to vote up or down on every plank in the Platform. In principle, this sounds fine, but the mechanics are difficult. The Bylaws require electronic tabulation, a three hour voting window, and a secondary review of any planks to be deleted based upon this vote. The number of votes cast in each convention is a small portion of the total delegates, and the process is expensive because of the requirement to rent tabulation equipment and have machine readable forms printed. To this date, not one plank has been deleted through this process.

Additionally, the Bylaws still provide for the deletion of any plank on a simple majority vote.

In short, we feel that removing this procedure simplifies the Convention, reduces costs, and removes no powers from the delegates.

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