petition candidates Archives

NRA Petition Candidates

In normal years, a candidate for the NRA Board of Directors who wanted to be nominated by petition would have months to gather the needed signatures. This is not a normal year.

The window to gather signatures opened with the Annual Meeting on October 2nd and closes on November 16th. Thus, instead of almost six months, a candidate will have approximately six weeks to gather 477 signatures of NRA voting members. As a reminder, those eligible to both vote and sign such a petition are Life, Patron, Endowment, and Benefactor members and Annual members with 5 continuous years of membership. If you have had a break in your annual membership, the clock restarts.

Runners-up on the ballot including petition candidates are eligible to move up into board openings when sitting directors resign or die. As NRA Secretary and General Counsel affirmed to Frank Tait at the 2021 Meeting of Members, write-in candidates do not qualify.

Frank Tait is the only person I know who is attempting to run by petition this year. If you know of anyone else, please put their information in the comments.

I plan on signing Frank’s petition. I only wish there was an event in the next week or so where I could gather a full page or more of valid signatures.

If you would like a copy of his petition, it is available for download here.

Return the signed petition to Frank Tait at 425 W. Wayne Ave. Wayne PA 19087. He needs them in hand by November 11th. Mine will go out in the mail tomorrow.

Please do not sign a petition if you are not a voting member. You can find your membership number on the label of whatever NRA magazine you receive.

We need more people who represent the actual members of the Board and fewer who represent either their own interests or those of Wayne.

Take a look at the picture below. It was originally posted on the blog NRA In Danger.

I have labeled it to point out Frank and the security monitor that the powers that be assigned to follow Frank everywhere in the Meeting of Members and the Board Meeting.

How damn paranoid do you have to be to put a security guard on one dissident member when you’ve already stacked the meeting with the Board, their spouses, and staffers whose jobs depend on kowtowing to Wayne?

The worst part is that you and I paid for this travesty with our dues. Even the KGB and Guoanbu are more subtle than this bumbling Gang of Four.

No NRA Petition Candidates For 2021

Unless there was someone besides Frank Tait seeking a nomination to run for the NRA Board of Directors by petition, there will be no petition candidates in the 2021 election. If you know of anyone else, please let me know in the comments.

Frank was notified yesterday that he fell short. He had submitted 725 signatures which was almost 32% greater than the required 551 valid signatures. However, he had 227 signatures disqualified for a variety of reasons. The greatest number of signatures disqualified was due to not being a member for five consecutive years.

Frank told me that he assumed that if someone went to the trouble to mail him a signed petition that the person was either a Life Member of some level or a five year member with voting privileges. He said his biggest mistake was not vetting those signatures which looked complete.

Given the restrictions on assembling in 2020 such as at gun shows, he really only had three months instead of the more normal five months to gather these signatures. I remember last year I gathered about a dozen or more valid signatures for Frank at the Grass Roots Policy Conference.

In 2017, there was a package of bylaw amendments that, among other things, raised the minimum number of signatures required from 250 to 0.5% of the number of valid votes in the preceding year. It was an all or nothing package. While some of the bylaw changes were mere housekeeping, others like changing the number of signatures required to be a petition candidate were not. Dave Hardy covered it well back then in his Of Arms and the Law blog.

I went back to read Dave’s post as well as the comments. I found the comments particularly relevant.

Ken914 wrote this, in part, on the bylaw changes:

If this is passed, the Board can assured the nominating committee, made up of Board members, will have complete control of who can run for the Board from now on. The limp-wristed celebrities, hangers-on, and 2A do-nothings that fill so so soooo many seats on the Board will be safe from the NRA membership attempting to replace them with new directors who will advocate for a full understanding of the RKBA.
Remember, this is the same BoD that defended Joaquin Jackson until his death. What could go wrong if we just let them become a closed club who hand-selects their own successors?

Jeff Knox, who urged a “no” vote on the bylaw changes wrote this:

Ken914 is spot-on in his assessment. This is an incumbent protection move, removing power from the members, and giving even more power to the Board.
David is correct that many of the changes are just housekeeping, and some of the other stuff could be justified, but this is an all-or-nothing proposal that would do serious harm.
The suggestion that Bloomberg is going to come in and take over the NRA – or stir up trouble by funding recall elections – is a straw man play. The formula they are suggesting would mean that only someone with Bloomberg’s money could possibly orchestrate a successful recall or bylaw petition.

I won’t go into the other changes wrought by the 2017 bylaw amendments. Suffice to say, it solidified power in the Board of Directors and has made another Cincinnati Revolt virtually impossible. Prior to these changes, Frank Tait would have been on the 2021 ballot.

I did vote NO on the bylaw amendments.

I am going to think long and hard before I support anyone that was nominated by the Nominations Committee for the 2021 Board election.