GLEP 39 [1] says: | Council decisions are by majority vote of those who show up (or | their proxies). During the last council meeting [2] there was some uncertainty about the interpretation of this. Therefore, the council should clarify it for future votes. Definitions: | Majority vote: | "*more than half* of the votes cast by persons entitled to vote, | excluding blanks or abstentions, at a regular or properly called | meeting." [3] | Majority of the entire membership: | "a majority of the total number of those who are members of the | voting body at the time of the vote." [3] Wikipedia also mentions a "majority of the members present", meaning "more than half of the members at the meeting" [4]. However, this definition does not appear in [3], which may indicate that it is a less common method. (IMHO it's also somewhat paradoxical: If a voting body has 7 members and only 5 show up, those can pass a motion with 3 yes votes. Whereas all 7 members cannot pass a motion with 3 yes votes and 4 abstentions. What would be the rationale for the complete body to be weaker than a partial body?) Intention of the wording: In the discussions about the metastructure reform in 2005, g2boojum as author of the "'old-school' metastructure proposal" (which led to GLEP 39) made the following statement: "I should mention that I'm not all that worried about having more than 7-10 representatives. Those who show up get to vote." [5] This appears to be the first occurence of the "those who show up" wording. AIUI, "majority vote of those who show up" means exactly that, namely that only those who show up can cast their votes (and those who don't show up cannot vote, e.g., by e-mail after the meeting). Also note that the phrase doesn't say "majority of those who show up" which would have a different meaning indeed. [1] https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0039.html [2] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20180909.txt [3] Robert's rules of order newly revised in brief, 2nd ed., 2011, ISBN 978-0-306-82019-9 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority (retrieved 2018-09-12) [5] Message from g2boojum to gentoo-core on 2005-03-26
In today's meeting, the council has unanimously passed this motion: "Council decisions are by more than half of the votes cast by the members (or their proxies) showing up at a meeting, excluding blanks or abstentions."
