Constitutional Review, Apportionment & Organization

2011-12 Charge 4 - Establish the need for a specific policy prohibiting ballot voting in the Faculty Senate. Faculty concerns center on the principle that faculty senate is predicated as a representative government.

After extensive discussion and research, the CRAO Committee decided not to propose any changes to the constitution regarding this issue. To the best of our knowledge, previous votes in Faculty Senate were carried out in accordance with the PPM and Robert’s Rues of Order, which is supported by the PPM. We suggest that the Faculty Senate use clickers or another type of response system for voting. We suggest that voting records be made public as described in Robert’s Rules of Order. Secret ballots are only allowed when the Faculty Senate has moved and approved a secret ballot by majority vote. The current method is time consuming and could be improved by use of clickers. Open ballots are an important part of representative government. None of this requires changes to the constitution since it is all described in Robert’s Rules of Order.