7 ms·

Rethinking Robert's Rules of Order

81 points by HR01 7y ago

hirundo 7y ago
I think Robert's Rules should be treated like our dev team treats Batsov's Ruby Style guide (1): Use them as a starting point but forked and modified as appropriate for our use case. And then maybe another teams likes ours better, and uses it as a starting point and forks it to make changes. Recurse as needed. Too bad it wasn't published initially on github in 1876. What were they thinking. (1) https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide
- NickNaraghi 7y ago
  I'd be a Patreon supporter of someone who maintained an open-source version of RONR on github!
ryanmarsh 7y ago
I love that I can walk into any caucus and know the parliamentary protocol and act effectively within it. Sometimes I wish “all hands” were conducted in this manner.
- journalctl 7y ago
  95% of what all hands meetings need are: a clear agenda, time limits, and someone to actually enforce time limits. Come to think of it, all meetings need that. What kind of business are you conducting at your all hands meetings such that RRoR would be helpful? Even Robert’s Rules itself says that the rules shouldn’t just be used for their own sake, because it’s all too possible for rule-making and procedure to get in the way of actually being productive.
jshaqaw 7y ago
The intentions behind the rules are noble but any organization I have been a part of which runs on them ends up being some group who have mastered the rules using them to torture some other subset who are there just trying to get something substantive achieved.
- RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
  There is a certain personality type which seems attracted to Robert's Rules as a sort of diceless pen-and-paper roleplaying game. Bureaucracy and ritual become their own ends. If you get too many of this sort of person in a meeting, it is virtually impossible to accomplish anything.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Which is why it is important that somebody you trust on your side reads the rules - the entire thing - and carries the book with the to all meetings. That person might have to be you.
crazygringo 7y ago
I'll be brutal here: Robert's Rules of Order are a severely outdated method that creates divisiveness and polarization through majoritarian voting -- the same types of problems we see in politics today. It made sense as a big improvement in the 1800's -- it doesn't in 2019. Key quote: "Its arcane rituals of parliamentary procedure and majority rule usually produce a victorious majority and a very dissatisfied minority that expects to raise its concerns, again, at the next possible meeting." Anyone considering Robert's Rules should read this first: "Breaking Robert's Rules: The New Way to Run Your Meeting, Build Consensus, and Get Results" [1] by Lawrence Susskind -- an MIT and Harvard professor. [2] That book is a "popular" condensed version of the ideas behind practical consensus-building. If you want to implement it in your organization, see his full-length "The Consensus Building Handbook". [3] It's textbook-priced unfortunately (for organizations to purchase, not curious individuals), but many academic institutions will have direct access to it online. [4] [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195308360 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195308360 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Susskind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Susskind [3] https://www.amazon.com/Consensus-Building-Handbook-Comprehensive-Agreement-dp-0761908447/dp/0761908447 https://www.amazon.com/Consensus-Building-Handbook-Comprehen... [4] http://sk.sagepub.com/reference/the-consensus-building-handbook http://sk.sagepub.com/reference/the-consensus-building-handb...
- tehjoker 7y ago
  I've used Robert's rules in a political context. Since we believe in rule by the majority (democracy) majoritarian rule is fine. Consensus cannot always be built and some people will lose a given fight. However, Robert's rules are so easy to game that it's easy for people skilled at them to use procedural tactics to gum up the works or blindside less skilled participants.
  - jhbadger 7y ago
    In many cases, "consensus" is just rubbing salt in the wounds of the losers -- not only do they not get their way, they have to pretend that they agree with the outcome that is decided on. As David Mitchell once said in one of his monologues, the idea of consensus robs people of the ability to say "I told you so!" when the bad idea that the majority favored fails, because with consensus you have to share responsibility with those who favored the idea.
impendia 7y ago
I'm a university professor, and I served on the Faculty Senate for several years. Our meetings were conducted by Robert's Rules. I share the negative views expressed here by others. Following the rules amounted to a form of bikeshedding. For example: "The Committee on Curriculum on Courses presents a list of 83 proposed changes to the Undergraduate Course Schedule. ... Is there a motion?" And so we go through an elaborate procedure, to make sure that everything is discussed and voted on "correctly". In reality, usually nobody read any of the documents that were provided in advance, and there is neither any discussion nor any dissent. At most, someone from Department X will object to some proposal that their own department has "requested", and ask that it be stricken. Occasionally the meetings get heated, in which case I agree that some sort of formal procedure is a good thing. But "following the rules" allows everyone in the room to believe that we've done our jobs. And when we've endured mysterious and unexplained budget cuts, at a time when tuition and enrollment are both at record highs, I'm not convinced we have.
- Animats 7y ago
  You have the option to move to split the motion, so that that items 21 and 45 are voted on separately and all the noncontroversial items can be passed. The rules are for a body that has the power to make binding decisions. That's sometimes time-consuming, but that's the nature of democracy.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    The rules themselves on the subject: > General Consent or Unanimous Vote. By general, or unanimous, or silent, consent the assembly can do business with little regard for the rules of procedure, as they are made for the protection of the minority, and when there is no minority to protect, there is little use for the restraint of the rules, except such as protect the rights of absent members, or the right to a secret vote. [1915 edition] Don't forget that key that if there isn't a minority to protect, you don't need all the rules. Split the things that people actually need to discuss out of the stuff that is unanimous, move that the unanimous stuff be won by acclimation, and move on to the stuff that actually needs to be discussed. Even Robert's Rules says to do it. People like processes, and following processes to their logical extremes, but at the end of the day the process exists for a goal ("give minorities a voice", in this case), and outside of that goal/need becomes silly and overbearing, and it knows it which is why it has always had escape valves.
teilo 7y ago
I fully expected this article to discover/declare that Robert was a Bad Person and therefore we must abandon RRoO. My knee-jerk conclusion wasn't far off. Not Robert, but his heirs are the Bad People. The premise of this article is the problem, not Roberts Rules themselves, regardless of edition: That if person A invented thing B, then no matter how useful thing B may or may not be, it is the character of person A, not the utility of thing B, that determines whether we can use it. Enough of this crap. Enough of outrage farming. Enough of guilt-by-association ad absurdum. RRoO, like any other invention or discovery, stands or falls on its own merits. I've seen RRoO used tyrannically to suppress debate, and I've seen them used wisely. No set of rules is going to perfectly fix contentious interactions or political underhandedness. Even consensus-based alternatives can be and are manipulated.
- pkd 7y ago
  I don't think there's any guilt by association being assigned to anything. The article in my head amounted to the realization that the corporation behind Robert's Rules does not itself adhere to the book's teachings and has had problematic elements in the past. So instead they recommend other resources, one explicitly still about Robert's Rules itself. >> I’m ready to advocate on my campus against all post-1915 editions (with apologies to Cleary) in part because of her politics and in part because there are plenty of alternatives. My new favorites are Nancy Sylvester’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Robert’s Rules, and Alice Sturgis’s The Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure The only outrage I felt came from your comment.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  > I've seen RRoO used tyrannically to suppress debate, and I've seen them used wisely. I had the pleasure of dealing with an eccentric co-founder who would do exactly this. It got interesting when I starting using RRoO procedures to attempt to stop him from derailing the conversation. Eventually he would just over-rule anyone he perceived as blocking his path. Lol it was such a cluster fuck at the end.
Taniwha 7y ago
We hacked RRO recursively for a political campaign: A wine company was importing wine from apartheid South Africa - under NZ law at the time any 100 shareholders could call a SGM every 6 weeks, we had 100 small shareholders ... we started with the AGM where the accounts had to be accepted by the shareholders for the company to continue to trade. Simply the script went like this: 1) Someone moves a motion of no-confidence in the chair (under the "aged and infirm incompetence act 1897" which does not exist, he turns bright red in anger but is required to step down while the motion is dealt with) 2) a vote must be taken, someone demands a written ballot which is their right 3) the chair proposes scrutineers 4) someone challenges the scrutineers and proposes their own up their own 5) so we have to vote .... at this point you recurse back to step 2, if they ever agree to your scrutineers you have someone in the wings ready to challenge with their own slate of scrutineers .... (it's important to keep track of how deep you are in recursion because the chair is bound to forget ....) Of course in practice eventually someone breaks and declares the whole thing silly, restores the real chair and continues the meeting, adopts the accounts etc .... then you go to court because the chair wasn't valid and therefore the accounts weren't really adopted and the company can't trade ... (we never got that far, after one round of this ALL the other wine companies capitulated)
- garmaine 7y ago
  Why are you proud of this?
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    The commentor didn't say they were proud, just that they did it. It is a clever hack even if it is a morally-bad one.
    - firepoet 7y ago
      Who knows? If the system is rigged against the righteous and the immoral are in charge, maybe hacking the system is the moral thing? Much to ponder on this one...
  - 7y ago
lazzlazzlazz 7y ago
Why hasn't anyone re-written Robert's Rules in a manner that minimizes the rule exploitation/manipulation, but builds-in consensus-seeking activities? Now that we've had 100+ years of game film on Robert's rules, you'd think we could find ways to rework the incentive structures, rules, and game theoretical elements so they're less likely to result in gridlock and procedural exploits.
- HR01 7y ago
  Great question! the article mentions some alternatives but they don't do exactly what you say.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Is it even possible to write such rules?
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Tabletop RPG systems have had multiple decades of being live laboratories for this sort of thing, have the benefit of stronger, sometimes more dedicated chair people (GM culture) than most parliaments/societies get a chance for, and yet have yet to solve for "Rules Lawyering" and rule exploitation/manipulating/min-maxing/etc.
- toast0 7y ago
  The exploits mentioned in the articles were narrow votes with thin quorums. You can require a larger quorum, at the expense of not always being able to get business done. You can require all motions to be introduced at a previous meeting or anyway published before the meeting at the expense of not being able to complete business quickly. (This is commonly required for local governments in California, at least)
- journalctl 7y ago
  Because any system that lets you modify the rules is inherently broken. There’s some apocrypha involving Kurt Gödel and a loophole in the US Constitution that gets at this point [1]. But it’s really not the system’s fault, it’s the users’ fault. Any rule-making system worth writing home about is exploitable, because that’s the only way it’s useful. [1] https://jeffreykegler.github.io/personal/morgenstern.html https://jeffreykegler.github.io/personal/morgenstern.html
lazulicurio 7y ago
I'm not a certified parliamentarian, but I do have a decent amount of experience with Robert's Rules from extracurriculars in university, so I just wanted to make two points. 1) This quote ("Under Robert’s Rules, silence equals consent") is incredibly untrue, and makes it hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously. Abstention does not mean that you agree with a motion, and there are protections (e.g. quorum) to prevent abuse by a small cadre of disingenuous voters. 2) In my experience, very few organizations actually take the time to understand and follow Robert's Rules. Most just rely on whatever rules some motivated members happened to cherry pick from the text, plus a smorgasbord of bylaws and policies drafted by the organization (see edit). There is an argument to be made that maybe Robert's Rules is too complex to be useful, but most organization members only need a passing understanding; as long as you have a chair or parliamentarian who is familiar with the ins and outs, they should be able to keep meetings running smoothly and shut down most attempts to lawyer the system. Edit: For example: "the December 1964 late-evening vote by leaders of Students for a Democratic Society to focus on the Vietnam War and the December 1966 late evening SNCC vote to expel all white members (19-18, with 24 abstentions)". But Robert's Rules typically requires a 2/3 vote for disciplinary actions (such as the expulsion of a member). I don't have a copy of the 1951 edition to confirm, but I would be surprised if it allowed expulsion with a simple majority vote.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  I had some similar thoughts. Out of curiosity, the original 1876 edition [1] doesn't include membership votes as requiring 2/3rds, but also doesn't directly address membership votes of that sort (and leaves that to a body's rules). It also uses the word "abstain" twice, but does not yet formalize abstentions. The 1915 edition, however definitely includes Vote to Expel Members as requiring a 2/3rds vote [2]. (It also doesn't seem to codify abstentions, other than generally allow for them [blank ballots in a balloted vote].) I'm also wondering if that "24 abstentions", which seems wildly high, if accurate. That's a lot of people not to care which way the vote went. Keep in mind that absentee ballots, and absent members, are very different from abstentions (and absent members do not count as abstentions, because they were not even present for the vote). [1] http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9097/pg9097-images.html http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9097/pg9097-images.html [2] https://www.bartleby.com/176/48.html https://www.bartleby.com/176/48.html

81 points by HR01 7y ago

I think Robert's Rules should be treated like our dev team treats Batsov's Ruby Style guide (1): Use them as a starting point but forked and modified as appropriate for our use case. And then maybe another teams likes ours better, and uses it as a starting point and forks it to make changes. Recurse as needed. Too bad it wasn't published initially on github in 1876. What were they thinking. (1) https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide

NickNaraghi 7y ago
I'd be a Patreon supporter of someone who maintained an open-source version of RONR on github!

ryanmarsh 7y ago

I love that I can walk into any caucus and know the parliamentary protocol and act effectively within it. Sometimes I wish “all hands” were conducted in this manner.

journalctl 7y ago
95% of what all hands meetings need are: a clear agenda, time limits, and someone to actually enforce time limits. Come to think of it, all meetings need that. What kind of business are you conducting at your all hands meetings such that RRoR would be helpful? Even Robert’s Rules itself says that the rules shouldn’t just be used for their own sake, because it’s all too possible for rule-making and procedure to get in the way of actually being productive.

jshaqaw 7y ago

The intentions behind the rules are noble but any organization I have been a part of which runs on them ends up being some group who have mastered the rules using them to torture some other subset who are there just trying to get something substantive achieved.

RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
There is a certain personality type which seems attracted to Robert's Rules as a sort of diceless pen-and-paper roleplaying game. Bureaucracy and ritual become their own ends. If you get too many of this sort of person in a meeting, it is virtually impossible to accomplish anything.
bluGill 7y ago
Which is why it is important that somebody you trust on your side reads the rules - the entire thing - and carries the book with the to all meetings. That person might have to be you.

crazygringo 7y ago

I'll be brutal here: Robert's Rules of Order are a severely outdated method that creates divisiveness and polarization through majoritarian voting -- the same types of problems we see in politics today. It made sense as a big improvement in the 1800's -- it doesn't in 2019. Key quote: "Its arcane rituals of parliamentary procedure and majority rule usually produce a victorious majority and a very dissatisfied minority that expects to raise its concerns, again, at the next possible meeting." Anyone considering Robert's Rules should read this first: "Breaking Robert's Rules: The New Way to Run Your Meeting, Build Consensus, and Get Results" [1] by Lawrence Susskind -- an MIT and Harvard professor. [2] That book is a "popular" condensed version of the ideas behind practical consensus-building. If you want to implement it in your organization, see his full-length "The Consensus Building Handbook". [3] It's textbook-priced unfortunately (for organizations to purchase, not curious individuals), but many academic institutions will have direct access to it online. [4] [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195308360 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195308360 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Susskind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Susskind [3] https://www.amazon.com/Consensus-Building-Handbook-Comprehensive-Agreement-dp-0761908447/dp/0761908447 https://www.amazon.com/Consensus-Building-Handbook-Comprehen... [4] http://sk.sagepub.com/reference/the-consensus-building-handbook http://sk.sagepub.com/reference/the-consensus-building-handb...

tehjoker 7y ago
I've used Robert's rules in a political context. Since we believe in rule by the majority (democracy) majoritarian rule is fine. Consensus cannot always be built and some people will lose a given fight. However, Robert's rules are so easy to game that it's easy for people skilled at them to use procedural tactics to gum up the works or blindside less skilled participants.
- jhbadger 7y ago
  In many cases, "consensus" is just rubbing salt in the wounds of the losers -- not only do they not get their way, they have to pretend that they agree with the outcome that is decided on. As David Mitchell once said in one of his monologues, the idea of consensus robs people of the ability to say "I told you so!" when the bad idea that the majority favored fails, because with consensus you have to share responsibility with those who favored the idea.

impendia 7y ago

I'm a university professor, and I served on the Faculty Senate for several years. Our meetings were conducted by Robert's Rules. I share the negative views expressed here by others. Following the rules amounted to a form of bikeshedding. For example: "The Committee on Curriculum on Courses presents a list of 83 proposed changes to the Undergraduate Course Schedule. ... Is there a motion?" And so we go through an elaborate procedure, to make sure that everything is discussed and voted on "correctly". In reality, usually nobody read any of the documents that were provided in advance, and there is neither any discussion nor any dissent. At most, someone from Department X will object to some proposal that their own department has "requested", and ask that it be stricken. Occasionally the meetings get heated, in which case I agree that some sort of formal procedure is a good thing. But "following the rules" allows everyone in the room to believe that we've done our jobs. And when we've endured mysterious and unexplained budget cuts, at a time when tuition and enrollment are both at record highs, I'm not convinced we have.

Animats 7y ago
You have the option to move to split the motion, so that that items 21 and 45 are voted on separately and all the noncontroversial items can be passed. The rules are for a body that has the power to make binding decisions. That's sometimes time-consuming, but that's the nature of democracy.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  The rules themselves on the subject: > General Consent or Unanimous Vote. By general, or unanimous, or silent, consent the assembly can do business with little regard for the rules of procedure, as they are made for the protection of the minority, and when there is no minority to protect, there is little use for the restraint of the rules, except such as protect the rights of absent members, or the right to a secret vote. [1915 edition] Don't forget that key that if there isn't a minority to protect, you don't need all the rules. Split the things that people actually need to discuss out of the stuff that is unanimous, move that the unanimous stuff be won by acclimation, and move on to the stuff that actually needs to be discussed. Even Robert's Rules says to do it. People like processes, and following processes to their logical extremes, but at the end of the day the process exists for a goal ("give minorities a voice", in this case), and outside of that goal/need becomes silly and overbearing, and it knows it which is why it has always had escape valves.

teilo 7y ago

I fully expected this article to discover/declare that Robert was a Bad Person and therefore we must abandon RRoO. My knee-jerk conclusion wasn't far off. Not Robert, but his heirs are the Bad People. The premise of this article is the problem, not Roberts Rules themselves, regardless of edition: That if person A invented thing B, then no matter how useful thing B may or may not be, it is the character of person A, not the utility of thing B, that determines whether we can use it. Enough of this crap. Enough of outrage farming. Enough of guilt-by-association ad absurdum. RRoO, like any other invention or discovery, stands or falls on its own merits. I've seen RRoO used tyrannically to suppress debate, and I've seen them used wisely. No set of rules is going to perfectly fix contentious interactions or political underhandedness. Even consensus-based alternatives can be and are manipulated.

pkd 7y ago
I don't think there's any guilt by association being assigned to anything. The article in my head amounted to the realization that the corporation behind Robert's Rules does not itself adhere to the book's teachings and has had problematic elements in the past. So instead they recommend other resources, one explicitly still about Robert's Rules itself. >> I’m ready to advocate on my campus against all post-1915 editions (with apologies to Cleary) in part because of her politics and in part because there are plenty of alternatives. My new favorites are Nancy Sylvester’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Robert’s Rules, and Alice Sturgis’s The Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure The only outrage I felt came from your comment.
GhettoMaestro 7y ago
> I've seen RRoO used tyrannically to suppress debate, and I've seen them used wisely. I had the pleasure of dealing with an eccentric co-founder who would do exactly this. It got interesting when I starting using RRoO procedures to attempt to stop him from derailing the conversation. Eventually he would just over-rule anyone he perceived as blocking his path. Lol it was such a cluster fuck at the end.

Taniwha 7y ago

We hacked RRO recursively for a political campaign: A wine company was importing wine from apartheid South Africa - under NZ law at the time any 100 shareholders could call a SGM every 6 weeks, we had 100 small shareholders ... we started with the AGM where the accounts had to be accepted by the shareholders for the company to continue to trade. Simply the script went like this: 1) Someone moves a motion of no-confidence in the chair (under the "aged and infirm incompetence act 1897" which does not exist, he turns bright red in anger but is required to step down while the motion is dealt with) 2) a vote must be taken, someone demands a written ballot which is their right 3) the chair proposes scrutineers 4) someone challenges the scrutineers and proposes their own up their own 5) so we have to vote .... at this point you recurse back to step 2, if they ever agree to your scrutineers you have someone in the wings ready to challenge with their own slate of scrutineers .... (it's important to keep track of how deep you are in recursion because the chair is bound to forget ....) Of course in practice eventually someone breaks and declares the whole thing silly, restores the real chair and continues the meeting, adopts the accounts etc .... then you go to court because the chair wasn't valid and therefore the accounts weren't really adopted and the company can't trade ... (we never got that far, after one round of this ALL the other wine companies capitulated)

garmaine 7y ago
Why are you proud of this?
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  The commentor didn't say they were proud, just that they did it. It is a clever hack even if it is a morally-bad one.
  - firepoet 7y ago
    Who knows? If the system is rigged against the righteous and the immoral are in charge, maybe hacking the system is the moral thing? Much to ponder on this one...
- 7y ago

lazzlazzlazz 7y ago

Why hasn't anyone re-written Robert's Rules in a manner that minimizes the rule exploitation/manipulation, but builds-in consensus-seeking activities? Now that we've had 100+ years of game film on Robert's rules, you'd think we could find ways to rework the incentive structures, rules, and game theoretical elements so they're less likely to result in gridlock and procedural exploits.

HR01 7y ago
Great question! the article mentions some alternatives but they don't do exactly what you say.
bluGill 7y ago
Is it even possible to write such rules?
WorldMaker 7y ago
Tabletop RPG systems have had multiple decades of being live laboratories for this sort of thing, have the benefit of stronger, sometimes more dedicated chair people (GM culture) than most parliaments/societies get a chance for, and yet have yet to solve for "Rules Lawyering" and rule exploitation/manipulating/min-maxing/etc.
toast0 7y ago
The exploits mentioned in the articles were narrow votes with thin quorums. You can require a larger quorum, at the expense of not always being able to get business done. You can require all motions to be introduced at a previous meeting or anyway published before the meeting at the expense of not being able to complete business quickly. (This is commonly required for local governments in California, at least)
journalctl 7y ago
Because any system that lets you modify the rules is inherently broken. There’s some apocrypha involving Kurt Gödel and a loophole in the US Constitution that gets at this point [1]. But it’s really not the system’s fault, it’s the users’ fault. Any rule-making system worth writing home about is exploitable, because that’s the only way it’s useful. [1] https://jeffreykegler.github.io/personal/morgenstern.html https://jeffreykegler.github.io/personal/morgenstern.html

lazulicurio 7y ago

I'm not a certified parliamentarian, but I do have a decent amount of experience with Robert's Rules from extracurriculars in university, so I just wanted to make two points. 1) This quote ("Under Robert’s Rules, silence equals consent") is incredibly untrue, and makes it hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously. Abstention does not mean that you agree with a motion, and there are protections (e.g. quorum) to prevent abuse by a small cadre of disingenuous voters. 2) In my experience, very few organizations actually take the time to understand and follow Robert's Rules. Most just rely on whatever rules some motivated members happened to cherry pick from the text, plus a smorgasbord of bylaws and policies drafted by the organization (see edit). There is an argument to be made that maybe Robert's Rules is too complex to be useful, but most organization members only need a passing understanding; as long as you have a chair or parliamentarian who is familiar with the ins and outs, they should be able to keep meetings running smoothly and shut down most attempts to lawyer the system. Edit: For example: "the December 1964 late-evening vote by leaders of Students for a Democratic Society to focus on the Vietnam War and the December 1966 late evening SNCC vote to expel all white members (19-18, with 24 abstentions)". But Robert's Rules typically requires a 2/3 vote for disciplinary actions (such as the expulsion of a member). I don't have a copy of the 1951 edition to confirm, but I would be surprised if it allowed expulsion with a simple majority vote.

WorldMaker 7y ago
I had some similar thoughts. Out of curiosity, the original 1876 edition [1] doesn't include membership votes as requiring 2/3rds, but also doesn't directly address membership votes of that sort (and leaves that to a body's rules). It also uses the word "abstain" twice, but does not yet formalize abstentions. The 1915 edition, however definitely includes Vote to Expel Members as requiring a 2/3rds vote [2]. (It also doesn't seem to codify abstentions, other than generally allow for them [blank ballots in a balloted vote].) I'm also wondering if that "24 abstentions", which seems wildly high, if accurate. That's a lot of people not to care which way the vote went. Keep in mind that absentee ballots, and absent members, are very different from abstentions (and absent members do not count as abstentions, because they were not even present for the vote). [1] http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9097/pg9097-images.html http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9097/pg9097-images.html [2] https://www.bartleby.com/176/48.html https://www.bartleby.com/176/48.html