MOTION

I move that for all NCF meetings and votes (including those held on-line),
a member's presence at the event of a particular vote is determined only
by the explicit casting of a vote in favour or against the question, or by
an explicit abstention. If a member does not cast a vote or explicit
abstention, or does not properly complete the voting procedure, then that
member is deemed to be not present for the purposes of that vote.

Moved by Richard Taylor
Seconded by Rosaleen Dickson

*** This motion CARRIED 1996-03-19. See minutes for details of vote. ***

BACKGROUND

Some NCF by-laws, including 37 regarding amendment of by-laws, require an
"affirmative vote of at least two-thirds (2/3) of the members present at a
meeting". For such votes, it is important to know exactly how many people
are present in total in order to know if the 2/3 mark has been achieved.
To accomodate both live meetings of large numbers, and on-line meetings,
we should know how members present will be counted. Existing voting
procedures already accomodate determining who is a member. It seems
reasonable to count the number of members who complete the voting
procedure as being the number who wish to be counted as present.

Votes requiring a fraction of members present give abstentions a similar
weight to votes against. For example, if half the members vote for a
motion to amend a by-law, and half explicitly abstain, then the motion
must fail, even though no-one explicitly voted against it. It is
unrealistic to count members as present because they voted on some other
issue when they choose not to vote at all a particular issue.

We need to clarify this method of counting immediately, because some of
the votes taken at the 1996 AGM will have different results depending on
whether "non-votes" are counted or not. I thought the interpretation
embodied in this motion was straight-forward and clear, but at least one
Director thinks otherwise. I hope this can be settled at our meeting of
March 19.