by I will have a more complete report on the NRA Meeting of Members up later. However, I wanted to get this statistics from the Election Committee out.
Bob Barr, former Congressman from Georgia and Director, was chair of the Elections Committee. He started out his report detailing how votes were tallied by an independent accounting firm and how they were read electronically.
Barr then gave these statistics:
- Ballots Mailed – 2,535,798
- Ballots Received – 78,327 or 3%
- Valid Ballots – 75,454
- Invalid Ballots – 2,873
- 1,163 received after the deadline
- 558 missing membership number
- 503 not signed
- 401 voted for more than 26 candidates
- 168 voted for zero candidates
- 47 used an improper ballot (last years or photocopied)
- 33 had multiple votes for the same candidate
- Ballots that contained write-in votes – 1,218
No write-in candidate received enough votes to be elected.
Barr then ran through the list of everyone elected or who failed to get elected. I had those name up earlier and you can find them here.
My first impression is that fewer and fewer members are bothering to even vote. Given a low turnout local or municipal election will have a response of 15% +/-, a response of 3% is horrendous. Either people feel their vote doesn’t make a difference or they just don’t care anymore. Bear in mind everyone who got a ballot was either a Life Member or a 5 year continuous annual member.
The second impression is that this is the time for petition candidates to get on the ballot. The bylaws state that for a petition candidate to be placed on the ballot the threshold is 0.5% of the valid ballots cast in the past election. That means a candidate would need 378 valid signatures to make the ballot. Compare this with earlier years when a candidate need 6-700 or more to make the ballot.
One final note is that Rick Ector was elected as the 76th Director for a one year term. Congratulations to Rick as this is recognition, in my opinion, for all his hard work in Detroit training thousands of women year in and year out.