Saturday, February 15, 2014

open forum for non-members

LP members who are not on the bylaws committee may leave comments here with draft proposals (specific language) or ideas for proposals (broad concepts without language) they want bylaws committee members to consider. There is no guarantee a committee member will introduce your proposal.

This is a list of ideas not yet drafted into proposals from those NOT on the committee.

  1. require Delegates to be at least Sustaining members of the national LP (Marc Montoni)
  2. increase dues to $45 (Marc Montoni)
  3. increase dues to $75 and include state & local dues (Marc Montoni)
  4. allow the national LP to collect state dues if at least 75% of states agree to $25; remainder shall be pooled to hire a field coordinator to build membership in the states that don't agree (Marc Montoni)
  5. treasurer should be a paid, nonvoting position (Marc Montoni)
  6. elect all regional reps off the convention floor by region chairs; state specifically they serve at the will of those region chairs (Marc Montoni)
  7. eliminate At-Large Reps and use the vacated seats to make regions smaller (Marc Montoni)
  8. party's leadership (LNC, LNCC, Bylaws, Platform, and Credentials committees) elected by proportional representation of caucuses based on percentage of members who chose to affiliate with that caucus (Starchild)
  9. allow all committees to do business via electronic meetings using any modality generally available to an educated person or actually available to each member of he committee (George Phillies)
  10. replace the gaap financial report requirement with a requirement that financial reports use rules consistent with the agency (FEC) to which we report -- that's a cash flow basis (George Phillies)
  11. require the credentials committee to include the same procedure(s) for securing delegation lists from each state (George Phillies)
  12. require that all committees are bound by decisions of the Judicial Committee (George Phillies)
  13. term limits for LNC membership (George Phillies)
  14. do something about floor fees (George Phillies)
  15. titles of officers should match other parties: National Chair, National Vice Chair, National Secretary, National Treasurer, National Director (George Phillies)
  16. add for a fixed term a "Party Archivist" charged with generating a full set of bylaws, minutes, platforms, etc. from historical records and putting them up on our web pages (George Phillies)
  17. require that Party Bylaws, minutes, etc. be placed on the web pages in a file format that can readily be cut and pasted (George Phillies)
  18. raise the sustaining membership dues to $30 (Dan Karlan)
  19. require nominators for President and VP be National Party members (Dan Karlan)
  20. shorten region composition time, submissions have to be in at opening of convention (Marc Goddard)
  21. raise the 10% region requirement to a higher percentage (Marc Goddard)
  22. prohibit the same states to be within the same region two conventions in a row (Marc Goddard)
  23. Attendance at the Annual Business Meeting is open to all and free-of-charge. The State Central Committee may charge a fee for other State Convention activities and services. Only Delegates to the Annual Business Meeting may speak and vote at the Annual Business Meeting. (Beth Duensing)
  24. eliminate the requirement for in-person LNC meetings, change to videoconference, require open access by LP members and archiving on a members area on LP.org (Marc Montoni)
  25. If three documented instances of non-response are provided for any LNC member, it should be treated as a de facto resignation. (Marc Montoni)
  26. Require LNC members to disclose three current methods of direct contact: 1) Postal mailing address, 2) phone, and 3) email. The failure to supply all three and to keep them current, shall be treated as a de facto resignation. LNC members who do not wish to be contacted by their constituents should not run for the position. (Marc Montoni)
  27. honor renewals-in-advance (increment by 1 year rather than starting from date of receipt) and allow multi-year renewals (Marc Montoni)
  28. allow the ten largest states to initiate recall/substitution/replacement of their Platform representatives (Marc Montoni)
  29. Let Libertarian Party members petition for a vote of the party's membership on any proposal not in violation of the party Bylaws or contrary to the party Platform (Starchild)
  30. Replace 6.4 sentence 1 with a ban on endorsing or nominating candidates who are not strongly libertarian on both civil liberties and economic freedom (perhaps as measured by their scoring at least 90/90 on the Nolan Chart). (Starchild)
  31. Reducing the number of members needed to co-sponsor a motion from 4 to 2. (Starchild)
  32. Reduce the time frame for voting by email to a 3-day window (with an additional 3-day window prior to the voting period for motions to be discussed and modified) from the current 10-day window. (Starchild)
  33. Any body that gets to name members of various committees together with LNC, uses LP resources such as but not limited to email servers and convention facilities, and be used as a communications medium e.g. for LNC and HQ staff to communicate with state chairs, should be bound to recognize all of the same state affiliates that the LNC does (Paul Frankel)
  34. single transferable voting for at-large LNC elections (Bill Redpath)
  35. setup regions by circuit court (Ken Moellman)
  36. secretary and treasurer elected by LNC, don't get a vote if not already on the LNC (Joshua Katz)
  37. LNC members need only be national or state members, need not be sustaining members (Joshua Katz)
  38. at-large removal: burden of proof before JC is on LNC, inaction overrules suspension (Joshua Katz)
  39. no separation of LNC discussion from business (all must be public), no secret lists (Joshua Katz)
  40. award presidential delegates by how close to winning an electoral vote (BetteRose Ryan)

3 comments:

  1. Could the html be changed so that these proposals are numbered?

    Last proposal: Other bodies should not be appointing members of LNC Committees.

    The Montoni proposals other than on dues are mostly excellent. I am not sure what 'non-response" is supposed to mean. My state currently charges $25/$15/$5 for membership. We do not organize by counties. Of course, MA in good Libertarian form has almost totally eliminated county government; there is none in Worcester or most other counties.

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  2. 35 Single Transferable vote works very poorly for electing several people.

    Some variation on the Cmabridge scheme is better. Roughly: It looks like STV, but when you have voted for a winner you ballot is set aside, and only people who have not yet voted for a winner have their votes counted for other people.

    10. The current party financial reports may not actually be GAAP compliant. Someplace...Have not found it again ... there appears to be a statement in the GAAP rules that if your filing is not with the IRS but with someone else, your
    financial reports are supposed to be compliant with their rules, so that your financial reports and your federal filings are consistent, which ours are not.

    27. Strongly endorse. The current situation in my opinion was a screwup when the bylaws were rewritten by the membership to kill off zero and $50 dues; I don't believe the convention meant the current interpretation of the rules, which is that when you renew early you are throwing away part of your current membership. The Montoni proposal correctly fixes this.

    Replacing at-larges with functional officers, e.g., Editor, Volunteer Organizer might be helpful. Tweaking the size of the LNC will not accomplish anything.

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  3. I would like to suggest changes to how regions are done. I had heard there was a consideration to reduce the number of regions and I started playing with the math. And I found something that might work for the party.

    I propose that regions are broken down by US Circuit Court regions. The purpose is that the fights we will face in coming years will be more and more in the courtroom, as we fight these draconian ballot access restrictions. These legal fights often go to Federal courts, since many state courts are populated with politically-connected appointees. And what happens within a circuit for one state directly impacts the other states in that circuit. Therefore it makes sense to work together within these circuits to make sure that a ruling for one state doesn't mess up an affiliate in another state. t may also open the door for additional amicus curae briefs from directly-effected state parties.

    I have done preliminary math based off of an LP National membership distribution, and I see that there could be 5 regions that are roughly similar:

    Region 1: US Circuits 1, 2 and 3 - 15.67% of LP National Members
    Region 2: US Circuits 4 and 11 - 20.35% of LP National Members
    Region 3: US Circuits 6 and 7 - 21.21% of LP National Members
    Region 4: US Circuits 5, 8, and 10 - 20.52% of LP National Members
    Region 5: US Circuit 9 - 22.25% of LP National Members

    Region 1 would be over-represented in this scenario, and Region 5 would be slightly under-represented; however, this would be specifically focused on dealing with upcoming legal battles, and we still have At Large and the other officers on the committee to balance things out a bit.

    Just my $0.02.

    Ken

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