Update to AMS Assembly E-Votes

Dear students,

I am writing to provide some context and background pertaining to the transparency of e-votes released on March 27th. The Office of the Secretariat has a mandate to provide confidential, impartial and sound advice to all members of the Society, in a manner that promotes good governance in the Society. As such, my office generally maintains a strict level of neutrality and is concerned with the procedural fairness of any issues brought to its attention.

Current Policy on Open and Closed Records

Per the AMS Constitution, (5.4.4.), voting at Assembly occurs by usual way of a show of hands, unless requested otherwise. Further, under the current Assembly Policy, secret ballots are not permitted for the Assembly. As such, any time ballots are used at Assembly (as was the case last year, in the appointment of team OAR to the Executive), how members voted is made public. On the other hand, records of closed session meetings of Assembly (5.6.3) are treated as confidential unless determined otherwise by Assembly.

To that end, there is no precedent to maintain how members of Assembly vote in open or closed session.  Some Assemblies this year have seen an upward of 30 motions be presented, and doing so would have presented an undue administrative burden.

Current Policy on E-Votes

The Assembly currently does not have any policy governing how e-votes function. E-votes and voting by email has been a practice implemented since the pandemic and has been restricted to the approval of motions that are deemed time sensitive and/or which arise in-between meetings of Assembly where a decision cannot wait to the next session. Voting by email occurs through a poll/form delivered to official emails of members of Assembly, in which the Secretariat can access how each member of Assembly voted (to verify the vote). If a member does not vote on an e-ballot, they are considered to have abstained. Currently, there is no precedent to release how members of Assembly vote on an e-vote, and e-votes are in a gray area between open and closed records.

Transparency

While I was, in my capacity as a student, aware of calls to release how members of Assembly voted on the three motions via email, I want to be clear that until the Assembly on Monday, March 31st there was no formal request, email or any communication from any member of the Society delivered to the Secretariat’s Office with respect to the release of the records. While this shows that rumors and information spread really quickly on-campus, for an office concerned with procedural integrity of various governance proceedings, I cannot and could not have acted on any information unless it is formally brought to my attention.

Additionally, while I do strongly believe in pro-active transparency, my office has a mandate to balance transparency, procedural fairness, and integrity. In this case, while Assembly members did not receive any communication from my office indicating that their votes were confidential, they also were not informed that their votes would be made public. Without an opportunity to meet as an Assembly to discuss their concerns, the release of how individual members voted without prior notification or precedent may have undermined the procedural fairness that members of Assembly are entitled to. In other words, because there was no precedent in the release of e-vote results, it would not have been reasonable to expect members of Assembly to know that how they voted is public information.

As the Secretariat, I serve the Society to facilitate its governance proceedings, and this ensures protecting the rights of all members of the Society. My office does not have a stance on the release of e-vote records so long as principles of procedural fairness are upheld.