by Over the coming days I will be doing a series of reports about the NRA Annual Meeting including the Board meeting and Meeting of Members. They will cover a number of topics. These topics will include the Elections Committee report, the Annual Compliance Report to Members, changes to the Executive Committee, and much more.
I am starting with the Elections Committee report which is embedded at the end of this post. Sadly, voting numbers were down again. Out of approximately 2.5 million ballots sent out, only a total of 59,781 were return for a voting turnout of a mere 2.43%. The total number of valid ballots was 56,850. This will mean that petition candidates will only need a total of 285 valid signatures to make the ballot.
One reason for the low turnout could have been that virtually all the candidates on the ballot were going to be elected. This was due to resignations of Board members which opened up a total of 10 slots in addition to the regular 25 3-year terms and the 76th Director. We may never know.
As I reported earlier in April when I gave out the draft election results, Isaac Demerest decided not to run for 76th Director which only left Lynn Gipson. Then Eb Wilkinson declined the seat he won. Thus, Regis Synan moved up to take a 3-year term, Jim Wallace moved up to take a 2-year term, and Isaac Demerest won a 1-year term as he had placed ahead of Lynn Gipson. As the Elections Committee report makes clear under Robert’s Rules of Order, Mr. Gipson was declared the winner by acclamation of the 76th Director seat.
All was well and good until Sunday afternoon.
We learned then that both longtime director Wayne Anthony Ross of Alaska and Lynn Gipson had passed away on Saturday, April 18th. My condolences to both the Gipson and Ross familes.
We took up the issue in Monday’s Board meeting regarding whether they would or could be replaced on the Board. It resolved around the meaning of Article VIII, Section 4 of the NRA Bylaws stating that the 76th Director “shall be chosen only from those persons who were nominated as candidates for election for Director in the mail ballot…” The debate was whether write-in candidates could be considered “nominated” within the meaning of this bylaw. It was ultimately decided that “nominated” only applied to those candidates who appeared on the ballot by a nomination from the Nominating Committee or by a nomination by petition. There were a number of arguments regarding this. One strong argument was that write-in’s had not been vetted to see if they were even eligible under the Bylaws unlike the other candidates.
Jeff Knox corrected me on the relevant section of the bylaws were in play. He said:
There was no question about write-ins being eligible to run for 76th. The question was on Article IV, Section 2, Bold Italic, filling vacancies occurring between regular elections: “…shall be filled by persons who ran and lost on the most recent mail ballot in rank order…” The question was whether write-ins “ran” on the “ballot.” They would have to be “otherwise qualified to serve,” but would receiving write-in votes be enough to consider them to have “run?”
By a vote of 27 yes to 33 no, it was decided as there remained no nominated candidates on the ballot those two positions will go unfilled. Thus, the 2026-27 Board of Directors will only number 74.
My vote was not to seat a write-in candidate and that vote had nothing to do with the candidates themselves. Indeed, I had urged voters to write-in Chuck Rowe’s name on their ballots as I thought he would make a great Director. Rather it went back to what I considered the letter and the spirit of the Bylaw itself.
One thing I might point out is if you are considering running for the Board of Directors now is the time to request a petition package from the NRA Office of the Secretary. As a reminder, potential petition candidates can now gather signatures electronically from eligible NRA voters.
The report of the Committee on Elections is below:
Oh come on, y’all just didn’t want to serve with me given that I know multiple people wrote me in. 🙂
Sorry to hear about WAR though. Fond memories of some events we were at together.
Interpreting meaning and intent of Bylaws is never fun and always upsets someone. We have run into this several times in our veterans’ organization where a Chapter decided to do something on the grounds that “the Bylaws don’t say we can’t”. The wording was ambiguous, the history of the organization didn’t support their choice, and at that point the only option was to run a Bylaw change to clarify the language, to determine whether the membership as a whole was in favor of allowing the action. It really highlights how careful you have to be when writing bylaws and analyzing the future ramifications.
You are absolutely correct. I will be reporting on the bylaw changes approved (or not) from Monday’s Board meeting in the days to come.
I’ll be eager to look at the minutes to better understand how a vote topic was worded so that multiple board members – including a very informed one like you – weren’t made aware of which sections of the bylaws they needed to review. This seems problematic. And while I agreed on the idea in the context of 76th, realizing that this was specifically about filling the non-76th vacancy, I’m concerned about this vote and the implications of the argument presented to justify it.
One strong argument was that write-in’s had not been vetted to see if they were even eligible under the Bylaws unlike the other candidates.
This implies that because you guys haven’t “vetted” someone who the members might overwhelmingly write in someday, you’ll refuse to seat them. I would assume the process for any write in who qualifies is that it is confirmed they meet the eligibility requirements and then given the seat they earned. If you guys just seat any write in without confirming eligibility, that’s a different problem that needs to be addressed. But if you’d seat an eligible write in who gets enough votes to earn a seat in the election, then this logic doesn’t apply for why you guys wouldn’t take an eligible write in for vacancies other than #76.
Now the irony is that I’m for a smaller board. However, I’m for a smaller board by design with a real plan to boost the committee system work and not because too many competent people are turning away from NRA & NRA leadership.
We’re going into another year of a board growing smaller for the wrong reasons and the logic of the cabal is guiding the decisions, along with some of the bad habits of not clearly communicating with the board what topics they are actually discussing since it sounds like multiple people didn’t understand. (I even learned through chatter that at least one very high vote getter didn’t even know the basics of the board or how big the board was. Given that my understanding was this was likely a Nominating Committee-backed candidate, the vetting being done is highly concerning if true. We already have enough incumbents who speak out of their a** because they actually don’t know about the structure or operations of the organization.)