[HSU-CoordBoardInternal] FundCom stipends - voting

Tue Mar 4 14:29:20 EST 2014

Perhaps I can offer some clarification to the members of FundCom who are
concerned. 

So far as I understand the discussion in Coordinating Board last night,
all previous proposals that have successfully gone through town meeting
have down so with a supermajority of 60%. There are some documents (my
memory isn't as strong on this point, ask Wesley) that state we run
under a simple majority as well as some documents that state we run
under a supermajority of 60% for the passing of material. So far voting
in town meeting has not resulted in a 59% vote in favor which is what
the Stipend Act got. The Coordinating Board noticed that these two
documents have conflicting information that has not yet been resolved.
The Coordinating Board decided that it was not the Coordinating Board's
place to make the policy decision as to which policy overrode the other,
as that is clearly outside of its purview. 

However, the Coordinating Board also recognized that its failure to
properly clarify what the Stipend Act was resulted in a lot of no votes
out of misinformation or lack of information. Therefore the Coordinating
Board decided that the best course of action (that would not violate its
purview) would be to run the proposal to town meeting again. We have
shared the ballot information for the vote with Dina, and by the end of
the week we hope that Fundcom can edit it to more suitably reflect the
information you think the community needs to hear. With more information
provided on the ballot, as well as another opportunity to reach the
community at town meeting, at least I personally think the Stipend Act
will go through. There will likely be less No votes. All it needed to
pass without causing this simple v super debate was to hit at least 60%
and it got as close as 59% in the last vote. 

Regarding the simple v super debate, this is the type of thing that the
document committee (which is meeting for the first time on Thursday at
8pm in the Office) will resolve. The Coordinating Board, (if I had to
imagine) regrets that it didn't get more clear information on the
original ballot in the first place. But the Coordinating Board (this was
the general temperature of our meeting last night) seems confident that
the Stipend Act will pass if you are willing to help us with the ballot
information and present again at the next town meeting. 

I don't know if that helps, and I hope I haven't misrepresented anyone. 

-Christopher Porzenheim 

At Large Member 

 decision to run the vote to town meeting was done for a couple of
reasons. 

On 2014-03-04 13:45, da11 at hampshire.edu wrote: 

> Hey Coordboard,
> 
> I have just finished talking to a member of FundCom, and I feel that I 
> need to reach out to you about some of the points of our discussion.
> 
> We were talking about the proposal, the voting and coordboard's 
> discussion and email. The main point of the discussion was that 
> nowhere in any proposal or endeavor of the HSU has it ever been stated 
> that there needed to be a 60% majority for a proposal to pass, which 
> is why this proposal is going back to town meeting. However, people 
> -including all members of fundcom and anyone who was not involved with 
> the HSU implementation process in the academic year of 2012/2013- were 
> under the assumption that since there was no clear passing measures, 
> and no specific reference to either 60% or 51%, that the passing 
> percentage was 51%. Which is the popular understanding of the term 
> "majority"; 51% is the majority.
> 
> I talked to them about our discussion, and about the understanding 
> that we were using the documents written on January 2013. Their 
> counter argument was that these documents have not been approved by 
> either the students, nor the administration, nor the Board of 
> Trustees. And since it was not specified anywhere, and that was not 
> understood by the community, that that is not valid. Therefore, the 
> passing majority would be the simple majority, which is 51%.
> 
> Therefore, their understanding of the proposal and the voting 
> measures, is that the proposal did pass yesterday, and the email was 
> not relevant.
> 
> Thank you,
> Dina
> 
> ------
> This is the INTERNAL mailing list for Coordboard. For the sake of transparency, all internal communications via email must go through this listserv, where they are publicly archived (that means that all emails sent through this listserv /are public publications/ and anything you say on this listserv could be reproduced legally by anyone). If there are any changes to meeting times or locations, then those emails must still be sent out to the Coordboard MAIN listserv (HSU-CoordinatingBoard at lists.hampshire.edu) so that the meetings can be open to all members of the Hampshire community. Listservs are not a secure method of communication and any sensitive info such as passwords or classified infomation should not be sent via listserv. Do not publish anything on the listserv that you would not be okay with being seen by people who aren't on coordboard!
> _______________________________________________
> HSU-CoordBoardInfo mailing list
> HSU-CoordBoardInfo at lists.hampshire.edu
> https://lists.hampshire.edu/mailman/listinfo/hsu-coordboardinfo [1]

Links:
------
[1] https://lists.hampshire.edu/mailman/listinfo/hsu-coordboardinfo
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.hampshire.edu/pipermail/hsu-coordboardinfo/attachments/20140304/86ee9826/attachment-0001.html>