From the Board President
By Steve Maker

Redesigning Co-op Voting

Because the Hanover Co-op is a co-op, members have the right and obligation to make decisions on major issues. Ever since our founding in 1936, members have made these decisions by voting in member meetings following discussion.

For a number of years, members have been asking for the ability to vote without attending a meeting. Until now, we have been prevented from doing so by the New Hampshire state law regarding cooperatives. Thanks to the work of several energetic Board and staff members, State Senator Clifton Below (District 5, Lebanon), and State Representative Derek Owen (Merrimack), this law was recently changed to allow a broader range of voting options, including absentee voting.

To change the way we vote, we must change the Co-op’s Bylaws. The Board of Directors plans to ask members to approve that change at the April 2002 Annual Meeting (this vote must be carried out the old way, in an official meeting). As the Board designs that Bylaw change, we are guided by several principles:

Different means of voting have different costs. For instance, in-store voting is easy for shopper-members but requires the polling sites to be covered by volunteers or staff during all hours of operation. Mail-in ballots allow anyone to vote, but necessitate verification procedures than can be time-consuming and expensive.

Members now have several ways to bring issues before the entire membership: they can talk to individual Board members, attend a Board meeting, call a special meeting by submitting a petition signed by at least 50 members, and raise motions during a membership meeting. Moving away from in-meeting voting removes the last method, as has happened for towns changing over to Australian ballot. (For the Co-op, between 1991 and 2001, only one member-initiated motion came to a vote, regarding a small tax issue. It was defeated.) Do we need to find a way to replace this capability, or are the remaining methods sufficient?

Understanding others’ points of view and the critical points of an issue are essential to informed voting. Without in-meeting discussions, it’s important to create other ways to achieve this. Informational meetings allow people to questions, get answers, and make their viewpoints known. If we hold those meetings in advance of the voting period, we can then summarize the discussion in the Co-op News and the Co-op web site so that all can benefit. Are there other communication methods we should try?

Bylaws need to be simple, sturdy and versatile to serve changing future needs. This requires separating the critical issues from those that may require different approaches at different times. Only the former should be encoded into bylaws. This is one of the hardest parts of writing laws that must work for many years!

If you have thoughts about these or other ideas about the bylaw changes for voting, please contact the Board of Directors and let us know your thoughts!

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