General Membership Meeting (October 28 2020) and Proposed Byelection Procedures

Good day,

Please allow this e-mail to serve as notice for our General Membership Meeting.  The meeting details are as follows:

Date: Wednesday, October 28 2020

Time: 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Online Meeting: Information will follow

The proposed agenda and draft minutes have been email out. and the proposed byelection procedures are as below.  As a reminder, if you would like to have your name stand for election, please email Caroline Sewell at csewell@cupe3799.ca or Kathy Shaw at Kathy.Shaw@unbc.ca.

In preparation for the General Membership meeting, the Executive wanted to give you advance notice of how we’ll be conducting our byelection.

Please see below for what we propose:

• It is encouraged that members sign on to Zoom via their computer or download the app ahead of time.  If you are unable to do this and need to dial in via phone, please contact Tamara by 10:00am on Wednesday, October 28th so she can verify your identity and help make arrangements for how you can vote.
• Members will enter a waiting room and will be added to the meeting once the Sargeant at Arms (Tamara Sweet) records you as “attended” on the sign-in membership list.
• Once we draw close to the byelection, the Elections Officer will become Chair of the Meeting.
• Questions will be asked in a “poll” format.  As we will not be requiring registration ahead of time, the votes for the polls will be anonymous.
• If you decide not to cast your vote, please be advised it will not be included in the overall voting numbers; the voting numbers will show the people that have cast a vote.
• The Elections Officer will announce the member that has been elected or acclaimed into a position.  In the case of multiple ballots, then the member’s name with the least number of votes would come off the ballot and another poll would take place at the meeting.
• The exact results of the vote will not be shared; however, please note that those elected will be 50%+1 of those who voted.
• The Elections Officer will be the only person with access to the results of the election.  The Elections Officer will take a screenshot of these results and save the results for 24 hours (in case there are questions).  After 24 hours, the file will be destroyed.

Towards the beginning of the meeting, we will present a motion to the Local, asking if the Local is in favour of our electronic byelection process as outlined above.  If the Local returns the motion as “Yes,” we will proceed with the byelection.  If the Local returns the motion as “No” the byelection will be tabled to the November General Membership Meeting.  If the Local is opposed to what we propose, it would be our hope that you can help us work towards finding an acceptable way to move forward with this byelection.

Thank you so much for your time and consideration.   Should you have any questions, please let me know and I’ll do my best to assist.

Thank you so much for your time and consideration.  Have a great day!

Kind regards,

Marlina Hawes

Recording Secretary