Date: January 2, 1998
From: Kevin Langdon, Regent [old e-mail address omitted]
To: Both "ExComs"
TNS E-mail List
ExCom Memo List
Subj: TNS ExCom Memo


Here is the January ExCom Memo, one day late.

I'm reluctant to throw anyone off the ExCom Memo distribution and I've only had three requests since last month's Memo from people who wanted to be added to the e-mail distribution, so I am again mailing hard copies of this Memo to everyone on the ExCom Memo distribution list for whom I don't have an e-mail address.

The Memo will continue to be available by ordinary mail for the time being, but I ask anyone with an e-mail address to please add yourself to the electronic distribution list. You'll receive more information, in a more timely manner, about TNS organizational affairs and you'll lighten one of the most unpleasant parts of this job: the physical processing of mailing pieces.

(It's not that you should care overmuch about my subjective experience of a bit of drudgery--we've all got our share--but this aspect of the job is the biggest single reason that I--and, I believe, several of my predecessors as Regent--have often gotten behind in getting out regular ExCom Memos. A monthly e-mail is much easier and less time-consuming.)

Also, I'll respond promptly to anyone who would like to be placed on or removed from the ExCom Memo list or my e-mail distribution list.

I have not received a single submission for this edition of the ExCom Memo. Of course, members of TNS who have e-mail do not have difficulty delivering their own messages to a list of 45 people, but those of you who have not availed yourselves of space in the Memo should be aware that we're still reaching about 25 additional people through snail-mailed copies; I hope that that number will decline, but for the time being there are advantages to having your stuff included here. I will also redistribute messages broadcast on the e-mail list as part of the ExCom Memo on request, but please be very sparing in making use of this privilege, as people on the e-mail list will tire of the repetition quickly.


Elections Officer

Following Shirley Sponholtz' withdrawal of her name from consideration, Philip Frandina has been appointed Elections Officer. The vote was unanimous among those whose votes I've received (Adams, Cooper, Harris, Jess, Kopp, Langdon, Poukey, White, and Woodruff--more than a majority no matter how you count). I haven't heard from Heather but she's been away
so this is not surprising (in fact, come to think of it, she asked that we try to get this worked out by the time she got back so that she'd be able to proceed with the election issue).


Ambiguity of Election Procedure

Article IV, Section 6 of the TNS Constitution provides that:

Voting for candidates for elective office shall be on a preferential basis, i.e., members will rank their preferences for all or some of the candidates in terms of their first choice, second choice, etc. The Elections Officer shall first tally the votes to determine whether any candidate has a simple majority of the first-choice votes. Those that have shall be considered elected. Those votes which fail to meet this test shall be subject to a second tally in which the information contained in all choices shall be utilized by a weighted vote, the weights being the precise reverse of the rankings. The remaining candidates receiving the majority of all weighted, preference votes shall be deemed elected. In the case of a tie on the second tally, a majority vote by the existing Executive Committee shall break the tie.

The trouble is that this does not specify a unique vote-evaluation algorithm. The phrase "the weights being the precise reverse of the rankings" is ambiguous. Suppose, as in the current election, we have nine candidates for Member-at-Large. The first ambiguity is whether voters are to list up to four choices (the number of positions to be filled) or up to nine choices (the number of candidates). In either case, there is a further ambiguity if a given voter does not mark all four or nine choices.

Taking the simpler example of the race for Regent, in which there are three candidates for one position, suppose a member marks only his first choice. A first-place vote counts three points. But does the member's first-choice candidate get three points while the other two get none or, as the member failed to mark his second and third choices, does each other candidate get a point and a half?

I have been aware of this problem for a number of years. Fortunately, we have never had an election in which different methods of tallying the votes would have produced different results, but this is a distinct possibility, particularly in the present election, with more candidates running than in any previous TNS election.

Therefore, I propose that the Executive Committee specify a vote-tallying procedure in advance of the election, to avoid the possibility that this problem will compromise the election. (There are better vote-evaluation methods than the "weights the reverse of the rankings" method, but we'll have to deal with that later in the ongoing process of revision of our less-than-perfect Constitution.) I move that:

In the 1997/98 TNS election and subsequent elections, members shall mark their preferences for candidates for each office for which there are more than two candidates, from 1 (highest) to the number of candidates for that office. If no candidate receives a majority of first-place votes (which, in the case of Member-at-Large, for which four are to be elected, shall be interpreted as more than one-fifth of all first-place votes), or if some candidates for MaL receive a majority but there are still seats to be filled, tallying of votes cast for the remaining candidates shall be carried out as follows: If there are n candidates, a first-place vote shall be worth n points, a second-place vote n-1 points, etc. If a member does not mark preferences for all candidates, all the unused numbers from 1 to n shall be added and a number of points equal to this sum divided by the number of unranked candidates shall be awarded to each unranked candidate.

This evaluation can be accomplished conveniently by means of a small computer program which I will send to Mr. Frandina and to anyone else who wishes to verify that the program implements the procedure correctly.

Members of both "ExComs": Please send me your votes on this motion.


John Hook's Constitutional Bombshell

These remarks respond to John Hook's message headed:

Date: 28-Dec-97 17:09 PST
From: John Hook > INTERNET:jhh@mindspring.com
Subj: TNS Constitution

In reviewing the TNS constitution, I have noticed something which eluded my attention previously. The disquieting words are in capital letters, below, in ARTICLE IV ELECTIONS, Section 2.

[Mr. Hook quoted only part of Article IV, Section 2, but as I will refer to passages he omitted below, I have reproduced a few sentences more (though not quite all) of Section 2. Mr. Hook's capitalization for emphasis remains.]

2. There Shall Be Three Categories of Elections: the election of six officers as members of the nine-Member Executive Committee, two with specific responsibilities as outlined above, and for other officers and committee members as the need shall arise; an open-ended (as to subject) initiative provision; and an Amending Formula for the Constitution. (All petitions that would alter, augment, or delete any provisions of the constitution as it exists at the time the petition is formulated shall be considered a [sic] constitutional amendment.) The deadline for statements of candidacy to reach the Editor shall be December 15. The publication date of these statements shall be the first issue of the Society's journal published in the following year. The deadline for publication of ballots shall be for that same first issue of the Society's journal in the new year and the ballots shall be returned to the Elections Officer by March 1. The assumption date for all offices and THE EFFECTIVE DATE FOR initiatives and CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS SHALL BE APRIL 1. Petitions for initiatives and for Constitutional amendments may be sent to the Editor at any time during the year. The Editor will publish such a petition within three months.

As far as I know, no amending formula has ever been established, or, for that matter neither has an initiative provision, so the requirements of the present constitution prevail. There are no exceptions to the above capitalized sentence. _Anything_ which modifies or changes the constitution may not take effect until the following April 1. If we delay, that would be April 1, 1999, which is intolerable, The only way to overcome it is to promulgate, immediately, a constitutional amendment changing the sentence beginning "THE ASSUMPTION DATE" as follows:

The assumption date for all offices shall be April 1. The effective date for initiatives and constitutional amendments shall be the first day of the month following approval by two-thirds of the membership of an initiative or constitutional amendment.

John Hook is absolutely right--only it's even worse than that!

Remember that problem with two Constitutional amendments that were not taken into account when Clint Williams published the Constitution? (This was a simple oversight; as I've been obliged to mention it several times, I now wish to say that this is not intended to cast aspersions on Mr. Williams.) As amended, Article IV, Section 1 of the Constitution provides for biennial elections.

It's clear that the amendment leaves an ambiguity as to when initiatives and Constitutional amendments can be voted on. According to one way of looking at it, a change in the terms of office of officers does not affect the timing of elections on initiatives and amendments (I favor this interpretation, as it comes closest to honoring the intentions of those who drafted both the Constitution and of amendment), but it can also be argued that the timing of these elections depends on the timing of
election of officers, which would mean that the next time a Constitutional amendment could take effect would be April 1, 2000.

This is indeed intolerably cumbersome and could lead to yet another Constitutional crisis if this language were interpreted differently by different interest groups. We need to make a change now to resolve the ambiguity and give us some flexibility over the next two years. The requirement for a two-thirds vote is protection enough against precipitous change.

I fully support Mr. Hook's amendment.

The above assumes that the journal will be issued monthly, as it should be anyway, but if it returns to bi-monthly or a month is skipped, the wording would still be relevant. April 1 is still used for assumptions of office until and unless the entire election schedule is changed.

The Constitution calls for monthly issues of Vidya and specifies that statements of candidacy and a ballot shall be published in the first issue of the new year (it was worded this way before the term of office was changed to two years) and that the deadline for ballots to be returned is March 1. Even if the January issue were published at the end of the month this would allow at least 28 days for voting; less than this could disenfranchise non-U.S. members, due to postal delays.

Under the present rule, if this petition should appear in the imminent upcoming January edition, the proposal AND COMMENTS BASED UPON THE PETITION, would appear in February, further comments and ballots in March, ballots mailed to arrive at the Elections Officer by the 21st of March, and approved initiatives or amendments to take effect on April 1. There is time to do this, but none to spare, and this is an extremely urgent matter.

I plan to submit such a petition to the Editor for publication in this January "Vidya" and also to all e-mail addressees. I urge you to comment on or correct any of the above, immediately, before I do that.

Regards,

John Hook

I will sign that petition.

I would also appreciate signatures on my petitions to change the Constitution to provide for a Psychometrics Committee instead of a Psychometrician and to return to yearly elections, below.

It isn't really necessary to have two issues for comments on the proposed amendments. When the petitions are published, members should be asked to submit their comments for or against the amendments. Then there can be a ballot in the February issue. This issue should be published no later than February 15, with a March 15 voting deadline. Whatever amendments
are approved will take effect April 1.

I request that the Editor publish the remainder of this message in the January issue of Vidya:


Proposed Constitutional Amendments

Kevin Langdon

These two proposed amendments, first published in Vidya #151/152 (April 1996), have become urgency matters in light of the Constitutional provision pointed out by John Hook recently which allows changes to the Constitution to be made only once every one or two years (depending on how one reads Article IV, Sections 1 and 2, of the TNS Constitution).

These amendments were among 22 proposed amendments included in Vidya #151/152. I now realize that it was too much to ask TNS members to evaluate so many amendments at one time, so I now propose that we stretch out the process of Constitutional revision, looking at just a few proposed changes at any one time. So far, John Hook, Dale Adams, and I
have been involved in studying revisions to the Constitution. I invite all members to take part in the continuing process of reevaluation of our Constitution.

1. Psychometrics Committee

The TNS Constitution as presently written provides for a Pspychometrician to determine the tests used for admission to TNS and the qualifying score on each. In practice, TNS has had a Psychometrics Committee since a year or two after its founding. Since August there has been a dispute regarding whether the "Psychometrician" appointed by the "reform" ExCom is
officially an officer of TNS, but there are two separate questions here:

A. Do we want to rely solely on the "standard" tests or do we want to continue to make use of the high-range tests designed by Dr. Hoeflin and me as well?

B. Do we want to have a "Psyhometrician" or a "Psychometrics Committee"?

As there is a certain amount of controversy about the precise meaning of test scores, it seems more prudent to place this important function in the hands of a committee, conducting its deliberations openly, than in those of any single person.

Text of the amendment:

1. Article I, Section 1, now ends with the words:

. . . following standards established by the Society's psychometrician.

Change "psychometrician" to "Psychometrics Committee."

Similarly, in Article II, Section 4, in the phrase "admission criteria established by the Society's psychometrician," substitute "Psychometrics Committee" for "psychometrician."

Add a section to Article III:

The Psychometrics Committee shall be responsible for examining available intelligence and aptitude tests, for selecting the tests used for admission to the Society, and for setting qualifying scores on the tests accepted. The Committee shall consist of five members appointed by the Executive Committee.

Petition

The undersigned members of TNS call for a vote on the above amendment.

2. Restoration of Terms of Office to One Year

The two-year-term amendment passed in 1992 was a terrible idea. Much of the touble of the past year and a half could have been avoided if there had been a 1996-97 election; elections are a safety valve that blows off political tensions. It may be a nuisance to have to deal with them once a year, but the alternative is worse. Also, we continue to see that many
officers burn out in less than two years.

My proposed amendment #14, published in Vidya #151/152 (April 1996), which would return the term of office to one year, should also be voted on immediately. The amendment and a petition to bring it up for a vote appear at the end of this message.

Text of the amendment:

Article IV, Section 1 refers to "biennial election[s]" in three places. Change each of these to "annual election[s]."

Petition

The undersigned members of TNS call for a vote on the above amendment.

[Heather: please print the above so that both petition forms wind up on the same page or facing pages, so that members copying the page need to make only one copy.]

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