Request For Co-Sponsors: Elect Members To The Committees Of The Convention

[Anastasia Wilford]

Fellow SLEC members,
It came to my attention as I was refreshing myself on our committee election procedures that our vote to elect people to the Committees of the Convention was void per Bylaws of SLEC VII.F Voting in Meetings since NOTA was not present on the ballot and submitting a blank ballot was not possible.

After consultation with Andrew and Christy for how best to resolve this while hopefully keeping the will of the body intact, I drafted the above motion which will simply allow us to take an up or down vote on the entire list of people who were announced as elected following the balloting at the November SLEC meeting. This will preserve the right to elect none of the candidates, without having to reballot the entire thing or go committee by committee.

And I would have waited to present this until after the current vote was completed, but the presumed Bylaws Committee has a meeting scheduled tonight and I wanted this to be announced to SLEC before the presumed committee members had to be informed tonight as to why we can’t do the business we had originally intended to complete tonight.

With all of that said, I am requesting co-sponsors and, following that, your votes in favor for the following motion:

Be it moved that LPTexas elects the following slate of people to serve on the 2026 Committees of the Convention.

Platform Committee:
David Constant
Christy Ford
Billy Pierce
Darren Pollok (temporary Chair)
Nolan Schmidt
Amanda Gibbs
Jack Westbrook

Credentials Committee:
Scott Peterson
Lisa Schlinkert
Matthew Gibbs
Bo Zimmerman (temporary Chair)
Jocelyn Pantke
Jessi Cowart
Mike Dooling

Bylaws:
Anastasia Wilford
John David Roberson
John Wilford (temporary Chair)
Paul Darr
Joe Roberts

 

[John Wilford]

I will cosponsor

 

[Kyle Russell]

There was a check box at the bottom of each ballot that said something like submit without voting, wouldn't that count as a nota vote then as you didn't vote for anyone on the ballot? That's how I interpreted that option.

 

[Matthew Gibbs]

I will co sponsor

 

[John Wilford]

There was a check box at the bottom of each ballot that said something like submit without voting, wouldn't that count as a nota vote then as you didn't vote for anyone on the ballot? That's how I interpreted that option.

I know that question was brought up in the discussion Ana and I were having and she didn't think it existed. I'm unsure what was said in the discussion between her, Andrew, and Christy. Can we confirm if that existed? If it did, I would tend to agree.

 

[Andrew Amelang]

There was a check box at the bottom of each ballot that said something like submit without voting, wouldn't that count as a nota vote then as you didn't vote for anyone on the ballot? That's how I interpreted that option.

@Anastasia Wilford - Thoughts?

Everybody else: Keep co-sponsoring if you're so inclined until we get this nailed down.

 

[Andrew Amelang]

I know that question was brought up in the discussion Ana and I were having and she didn't think it existed. I'm unsure what was said in the discussion between her, Andrew, and Christy. Can we confirm if that existed? If it did, I would tend to agree.

I don't recall that being discussed in our convo. I'll ping Christy on Discord.

 

[Anastasia Wilford]

There was a check box at the bottom of each ballot that said something like submit without voting, wouldn't that count as a nota vote then as you didn't vote for anyone on the ballot? That's how I interpreted that option.

I don't recall seeing that, and it would be an update to how OpaVote has worked in the past, and for that reason I didn't bring it up in my discussions with Andrew and Christy because normally we've had to explicitly list NOTA in order to fall in line with our bylaws. That's also why we typically either set a time limit or close balloting after a period of time so we aren't chasing down people who are intentionally abstaining.

Further, I question whether that would suffice since an empty ballot would typically be counted as an abstention and abstentions are not counted in the total vote count to determine how many votes in favor are required to reach a majority (unless explicitly stated like in our electronic voting rules), and if an empty ballot isn't counted toward the requirement to reach a majority, then the right to not elect a candidate was not observed.

 

[Anastasia Wilford]

Further, if SLEC wants to preserve the committees as elected, we may want to pass this motion because if it turns out that there was a means to submit a blank ballot, and any blank ballots were cast but not counted toward the total needed to reach majority, we may end up with some people being dropped from the committees.

But Christy is going to see if she can verify that through OpaVote after she gets home today and let us know.

 

[Kyle Russell]

Just something we can look at in the future if that is an option now and how that system counts that.
I will cosponsor this motion.

 

[Amanda Gibbs]

I will co-sponsor.

 

[Scott Talley]

I will co sponsor

 

[Brandon Ruhmann]

I will cosponsor.

 

[Anastasia Wilford]

@Andrew Amelang, we've met the co-sponsor threshold

 

[Jacob Bradley]

ill cosponsor even though i think we made the threshold

 

[Joe Burnes]

Fellow SLEC members,
It came to my attention as I was refreshing myself on our committee election procedures that our vote to elect people to the Committees of the Convention was void per Bylaws of SLEC VII.F Voting in Meetings since NOTA was not present on the ballot and submitting a blank ballot was not possible.

After consultation with Andrew and Christy for how best to resolve this while hopefully keeping the will of the body intact, I drafted the above motion which will simply allow us to take an up or down vote on the entire list of people who were announced as elected following the balloting at the November SLEC meeting. This will preserve the right to elect none of the candidates, without having to reballot the entire thing or go committee by committee.

And I would have waited to present this until after the current vote was completed, but the presumed Bylaws Committee has a meeting scheduled tonight and I wanted this to be announced to SLEC before the presumed committee members had to be informed tonight as to why we can’t do the business we had originally intended to complete tonight.

With all of that said, I am requesting co-sponsors and, following that, your votes in favor for the following motion:

Be it moved that LPTexas elects the following slate of people to serve on the 2026 Committees of the Convention.

Platform Committee:
David Constant
Christy Ford
Billy Pierce
Darren Pollok (temporary Chair)
Nolan Schmidt
Amanda Gibbs
Jack Westbrook

Credentials Committee:
Scott Peterson
Lisa Schlinkert
Matthew Gibbs
Bo Zimmerman (temporary Chair)
Jocelyn Pantke
Jessi Cowart
Mike Dooling

Bylaws:
Anastasia Wilford
John David Roberson
John Wilford (temporary Chair)
Paul Darr
Joe Roberts

Is being on a committee a "party position"? To me, officers are party positions but I wouldn't automatically consider being a member of a sub-committee to be a party position.

I haven't looked but I'm guessing our document does not define "party position"...but it should. All of our documents need a robust definitions section. This is something I was surprised to see missing when I first joined the party. The vast majority of all legal documents I have ever had the displeasure of having to read and sign always contain this type of thing and I assume it is to minimize ambiguity and wiggle room.

I also wouldn't consider our online forum to be a "meeting", which the subsection of rules you brought up concern votes in meetings.

 

[John Wilford]

Is being on a committee a "party position"? To me, officers are party positions but I wouldn't automatically consider being a member of a sub-committee to be a party position.

I haven't looked but I'm guessing our document does not define "party position"...but it should. All of our documents need a robust definitions section. This is something I was surprised to see missing when I first joined the party. The vast majority of all legal documents I have ever had the displeasure of having to read and sign always contain this type of thing and I assume it is to minimize ambiguity and wiggle room.

This topic came up as well, "Party Position" is not defined "Party Office" is and I'm going to advocate Bylaws comm bring this language in line with the language defined in LPTexas Bylaws or define it. That said, I do think this is a Party Position, especially since the committees we filled are standing committees that are outlined in LPTexas Bylaws, not some ad-hoc committee we threw together to provide the coffee at the next meeting or something...

 

[Anastasia Wilford]

"Party office" is defined in our Bylaws which, considering the definition there and the language here, I would say it is certainly within the spirit of the bylaws that those two terms are interchangeable, though this is something John and I have talked about needing to clean up.

Further, "party officer" is defined and it does not reflect the language used referring to how "party positions" are chosen

 

[Joe Burnes]

This topic came up as well, "Party Position" is not defined "Party Office" is and I'm going to advocate Bylaws comm bring this language in line with the language defined in LPTexas Bylaws or define it. That said, I do think this is a Party Position, especially since the committees we filled are standing committees that are outlined in LPTexas Bylaws, not some ad-hoc committee we threw together to provide the coffee at the next meeting or something...

Thank you for making sure our bylaws committee is aware and will address this.

At first read, I thought this was addressing the vote we have for the committee on the code of conduct.

I would agree that being elected as a member of one of the bylaws outlined committees would qualify as a party position, but I would be a lot more comfortable with it if that definition existed in the documents.

I hope our bylaws committee has the time to consider adding a definitions section where needed and populating it.

 

[Anastasia Wilford]

Thank you for making sure our bylaws committee is aware and will address this.

At first read, I thought this was addressing the vote we have for the committee on the code of conduct.

I would agree that being elected as a member of one of the bylaws outlined committees would qualify as a party position, but I would be a lot more comfortable with it if that definition existed in the documents.

I hope our bylaws committee has the time to consider adding a definitions section where needed and populating it.

I expect that will be an easy one to address