COMensarations

Friday, November 11, 2005

Tempests, Teapots and Denver Mensa — 051111

The Denver Mensa kerfuffle continues.

And, as always, the story grows in the telling.

Well. It WAS a three way race for the position of LocSec; Doug Smith, Mario De Benedittis and Sarah Welborn.

But, yesterday, Sarah dropped out of the race.

Not so much of a problem, but it seems that some people who voted for Sarah had already mailed in their ballots; well ahead of the deadline. Now they want to vote for someone other than Sarah.

Mario thinks that anyone who has already voted should not be allowed to change their ballot.

Doug reports that there is nothing in the by-laws that addresses this situation. He thinks that being so, the Election Committee should decide the issue.

His statement, if correct—I haven’t reviewed the by-laws since that long reading of them at an ExComm meeting in 2002—makes good sense to me. I don’t recall there being anything in there that deals with the situation either; if they had not been changed. There is a mechanism that the Election Committee could establish to deal with this sort of situation. And the mechanism could be incorporated into the by-laws.

Who knew that being on the Election Committee could be so ‘interesting’?

What I’m intrigued with is the difference in approach that the two candidates for LocSec are espousing. One is arbitrary. The other is (1) working within the system, i.e., observing the Rule of Law, and (2) flexible, allowing the system to do what it is supposed to do.

That IS significant and, I think, indicative of how they would manage the chapter’s business. Considering that participation is strictly voluntary and most of us are something in the way of being totally free thinkers and considerably independent, the decision of who is going to be LocSec could have serious ramifications on the next years activities.