[EM] Comments re Robert's Rules of Order

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 01:01 PM 8/4/2005, RLSuter at aol.com wrote:
>I will comment one more time in response to Mr. Lomax's
>defense of Robert's Rules. At the end of his remarks posted
>yesterday, he states (quoting me):
>
> >> The fact that none of them has yet become as widely
> >>accepted doesn't mean they aren't better or that they won't
> >>someday become more widely accepted than Robert's Rules
> >>now are.
> >
> >The comment is useless unless an alternative to Robert's Rules
> >is suggested, which has not happened here.
>
>No, it isn't at all useless, as I'll explain below.

The question was about process to be used immediately.

I'll stand with what I wrote: Mr. Suter does not understand Robert's Rules, 
so his criticism of the Rules is ... off. For one thing, Robert's Rules are 
simply a default set of rules developed over a very long period of 
experience with deliberative bodies. Robert did not invent the rules, in 
general, he codified them, as I understand the history. These rules are 
really like common law, they represent the combined thinking and wisdom of 
a large number of people.

>The question I'm concerned about is whether nor not there
>are alternatives to Robert's Rules (I'll call them
>"Robert's") that would enable people to conduct meetings
>more easily and/or efficiently and/or pleasantly and/or
>democratically and/or rationally and/or with better and more
>enduringly satisfying results.

It is going to be quite difficult to be more democratic than Robert's 
Rules. What Robert's Rules do is to firmly implant the sovereignty of a 
meeting in the members. Any officer, like the chair, is clearly only a 
servant of the members, and is subject, in his or her capacity as chair, to 
the decisions of the members.

It is impossible that there are better alternatives to Robert's Rules? 
Well, I'd say that it is unlikely that better rules will be drastically 
different from Robert's. Mr. Suter seems to have overlooked that I've 
mentioned a number of times that I have substantial experience with 
alternatives to Robert's. Consensus rules and methods can be *very* 
satisfying. There has been a lot of experimentation.

>  If there are (and I can think
>of no way to prove there aren't), who would not want to know
>what those alternatives are?

Of course. But when something exists that works well, it is really so 
strange to recommend it?

*Obviously* there is no way to prove that there is no better set of rules 
than Robert's. The very assertion would be silly. And, of course, I didn't 
assert that, nor has anyone asserted that here. This is Mr. Suter's straw man.

However, I'll just say that, with some experience and interest, I haven't 
seen a better set of rules to start with, for a deliberative body. Very 
much, each body will have its own special needs. Robert's rules can easily 
be modified to change, for example, the number of votes required to close 
debate and proceed to vote. The U.S. Senate has 60% instead of Robert's 
2/3, for example. I think Robert's number is better....

>  The only exceptions I can think
>of are people who have vested interests in maintaining the
>status quo, such as publishers of various editions of
>Robert's and professional parliamentarians who trade their
>expertise in Robert's for pay and perhaps amateur
>parliamentarians who have invested a great deal of time in
>efforts to understand and apply Robert's and perhaps to
>defend them against people like me who have the temerity to
>question them.

Or perhaps anyone who has studied the matter and who must be biased because 
he has a different opinion from Mr. Suter.

>One thing I must ask of Mr. Lomax is whether he is a
>professional parliamentarian or a heavily invested amateur.

I already answered the first. Irritating, it is, when it is obvious that 
what I write is not being read. I don't mind when the general reader 
decides that I'm to long-winded or boring -- it is really my responsibility 
to engage that reader -- but I do mind when someone is sufficiently 
interested to begin to sharply criticize what he obviously has not read 
with any care.

As to the second, "heavily invested" is a weird term. Does it mean that I 
have years of experience with Robert's Rules? Yes, I have that. Does that 
mean, however, that I have more experience with RR than with other 
organizational forms, so that somehow I would be at a disadvantage if an 
organization decides not to use the rules? Then this would not be true for 
me. I probably have more experience with consensus rules.

>If so, then he needs to state that up front before making
>additional comments. That would at least explain why he has
>been so adamantly defensive of Robert's

There is an easier explanation: I often will intervene when I see ignorance 
attacking methods and ideas known to benefit those who use or follow them.

>  and so unwilling
>even to entertain the possibility that there may be better
>ways to conduct meetings or that Robert's may have at least
>MINOR defects or insufficiencies, owing perhaps to
>widespread ignorance about alternative single winner voting
>methods (even among professional parliamentarians).

Voting method, under Robert's Rules, is certainly at the discretion of the 
assembly. I really don't remember much in the Rules about voting methods, 
it is not a primary concern of the rules. I'd have to look it up.

>In my view, the single most useful voting method for
>choosing from among multiple alternatives in meetings (e.g.,
>when and where to have the next meeting) is simple approval
>voting.

I'd like to point out that Approval Voting, so-called, is allowed by 
default under Robert's Rules. It only becomes possible to even begin to 
question the legitimacy of overvoting when there is a written ballot. And 
I've never seen a rule in the book that overvoted ballots should be 
discarded....

So *where* did the idea come about that somehow Robert's Rules and Approval 
Voting were incompatible?

>  It requires no more time (or very little more) than
>plurality voting

It *is* plurality voting. Considering Approval and Plurality different is a 
convention we follow, where we imagine that Approval is something other 
than a plurality method. Plurality describes how the winner is determined 
from the vote count (the candidate with the most votes, with a plurality, 
wins), Approval is a modern term which emphasizes the effect of allowing 
overvoting, which is part of how the vote count itself is determined. 
Allowing overvoting in a show-of-hands situation can take a small amount of 
time more. But actually, it is very common for it to not be necessary to 
even count the hands....

>, and it is arguably a much fairer and more
>rational and efficient means for making some kinds of
>important decisions than the usual method involving making,
>debating, and voting on a series of motions.

Huh? All it takes under Robert's Rules to bypass all that stuff is for 
someone to propose *whatever* procedure they want, for someone else to 
second it, and for a majority to accept it. If the group really wants it, 
the part of this that would take the longest time is simply making the 
proposal. The second and vote can take literally seconds. Unless there is a 
substantial group that does *not* want this expedited procedure.

Approval Voting, or any kind of voting, is not in any way inconsistent with 
Robert's Rules, which is about deliberative process, not about voting 
method. Voting method is little more than a footnote in Robert's (possibly 
literally).

But I have proposed many times that any vote by any election method, unless 
the vote itself makes it moot, should be followed by a motion to ratify, 
which requires a plurality vote to succeed. If more people are satisfied 
with the outcome than are not, the vote is not adopted and further process 
is necessary. Got a better idea?

By all means. I'm all ears.

>The first edition of Robert's was published something like
>100 years BEFORE approval voting was invented. Even today,
>30 years after that important invention, only a very tiny
>fraction of the public even knows about approval voting,
>much less is aware of how easy it is to use and the good
>reputation it has gained among political scientists who are
>knowledgeable about voting methods.

Sure. So? What does this have to do with the usability of Robert's Rules? 
Robert's Rules are not exclusive, they are, I'll say again, a default set 
of rules to be used for a deliberative assembly. "Deliberative," in 
political science, is what is called "Argument," and Voting is 
"Aggregation." Voting method is not considered terribly important in 
Robert's Rules because the rules are designed to deal with one question at 
a time, primarily. And that is where they shine. When you complicate things 
by trying to simultaneously consider more than two alternatives, well, you 
have, indeed complicated them, possibly to such an extent that the best 
outcome becomes hidden.

The election method that uses this binary tree is Condorcet, and it is only 
the weirdness of cycles that makes Condorcet fall short in theory. Really, 
the default method in Robert's is Condorcet, but, of course, it was not 
stated that way.... (By this I mean that the basic deliberative procedure 
in Robert's breaks down a question into a series of yes/no questions. But 
that is only under the formal rules. Robert's understands that this is not 
appropriate for everything; indeed, large deliberative bodies do most of 
their business in committee, with relaxed rules.

However, I've seen large bodies try to do without Robert's. I have never 
seen this work well. (More specifically, what I have seen is a large group 
of people come together at a national conference, and these people had been 
quite accustomed to using informal consensus process in relatively small 
groups. When they tried to do with a large meeting what had worked 
splendidly in small meetings, it was a spectacular failure. Indeed, this is 
how I came, over the next year, to work on the Charter committee to develop 
process, to propose process, and suggest Robert's Rules, which was adopted 
by about a 90% vote, and then to be elected, unanimously, to chair the next 
meeting. I've seen the difference.

>But that is just one of many reasons (again, unless you have
>a vested interest in Robert's) for wanting to know whether
>Robert's may need major revisions or whether there may be
>superior alternatives methods for conducting meetings. One
>thing we know is that meetings often go badly or produce bad
>results. There are many POSSIBLE reasons, all of which
>deserve serious consideration.

Yes. And I do know many of the reasons. Indeed, this is the major focus of 
my work. I live in a Town Meeting town. The moderator of our town meeting, 
indeed, when I asked him about the rules, said very strongly that the 
meeting did not use Robert's Rules, it used another standard set of rules 
which are published and in common use in New England. And then he gave me 
an example of how the rules were different. And what he said was the way 
that Town Meeting Rules worked was exactly the default Robert's Rules 
procedure.

The standard Town Meeting rules seem to be -- I haven't checked in 
sufficient detail to know for sure -- Roberts Rules modified, as the rules 
usually are, for the special purpose of dealing with Town Meetings, where 
many participants don't know the rules. However, at Town Meeting, where I, 
without knowing the special Town Meeting rules, used Robert's Rules (as if 
they were the rules) to expedite meeting process, I found that just about 
everything I proposed was adopted unanimously. I'm new in this town, 
relatively speaking. And a number of townspeople, over the next few days, 
came up to me and thanked me....

Robert's Rules really are, as I said, a codification of common law, which 
is mostly common sense. Sometimes a rule may seem strange until you have 
experience with the actual situations the rules were designed to address.

>One possible reason is that Robert's are often applied
>incorrectly by chairs of meetings and other people, as Mr.
>Lomax argues.

Yes.

>  If that's the main reason, then better general
>education about meeting conduct and better training of
>meeting chairs are needed.

Indeed! Exactly!

>The problem is, education and training take time, so this is
>at best only a partial solution. Another good partial
>solution might be the development of very simplified meeting
>rules that could be learned easily and quickly and used for
>meetings in which all or most people lack knowledge of
>Robert's.

Again, as another pointed out, such summaries of Robert's Rules exist. 
Really, the rules one uses in Roberts the most will fit on one side of a 
sheet of letter paper.

>Such simplified rules might be far inferior to
>Robert's but also far better than nothing.

This presumes that it is either one or the other. Why not both? Why not 
adopt the full rules and use the simple ones. At any point, then, when a 
situation arises, anyone can suggest that there is a rule for dealing with 
that situation. Typically a group will have a parliamentarian, who would 
simply be someone who is relatively familiar with the rules and who is 
generally trusted to give impartial advice.

And, here is where it gets interesting. As we have seen recently in the US 
Senate, or at least threatened there, the final interpreter of the rules is 
not the parliamentarian, nor is it the chair. It is the assembly. Suppose 
the parliamentarian does come up with some fancy-dancy rule that does not 
make sense to the members of the meeting. If the members are cowed before 
the rules, if they think that, just because it says such and such in the 
rules, it has to be that way, then, yes, the Rules High Priests will be in 
charge, they can manipulate the outcome. But if the members are *not* 
cowed, and they think that a rule is possibly being interpreted incorrectly 
or in a biased way, they don't have to have an explanation, they don't have 
to be sophisticated. What will happen is that the chair will rule, either 
following the alleged rule or not. Then, if anyone does not agree with that 
interpretation and action, they can, immediately, appeal the ruling of the 
chair. As I recall, this is a priority motion, it is undebatable and it is 
decided by a simple majority vote.

The assembly does what the majority decides is correct. The rules, really, 
are just suggested guidelines. Yes, this can be abused. If the assembly 
really is trying to *change* the rules, it should, by courtesy, follow that 
procedure rather than using its interpretive right. But, in the end, as 
I've written many times, the majority must retain the right of decision, or 
you have an oligarchy.

>  If so, they
>deserve consideration as an alternative that would be
>preferable to Robert's in at least some situations.

There are plenty of alternatives to Robert's that are preferable in some 
situations. Nobody has suggested otherwise.

>Another possibility is that Robert's Rules are defective or
>inadequate in minor but easily improvable ways.

Indeed, this is always the case, it is assumed that the default rules will 
not be the best for each individual assembly, that each assembly will make 
its own modifications.

>  Perhaps all
>that is needed is to incorporate recent insights about
>voting methods and to make minor modifications of some
>rules, such as the rule that prohibits any debate of motions
>to end debate and call for a vote on the previous question.

Which, of course, would be to gut a central principle, and which would be 
highly dangerous. It is absolutely appropriate to require a supermajority 
for a cloture vote. It is absolutely insane not to allow a cloture decision 
to be made. If you allow debate of cloture, when does that debate terminate?

Sure, many meetings have grappled with this problem, and there are all 
kinds of solution. Robert's suggests a default one. Many bodies deal with 
it differently.

>(I would argue that at least one person should be allowed to
>speak against a motion to end debate before that motion is
>voted on.

How long is that person allowed to speak?

>  I would further argue that this revision should be
>incorporated into future editions of Robert's so that it has
>a chance of becoming a widely accepted practice. Mr. Lomax
>and others will no doubt disagree, but certainly it is a
>legitimate and not unreasonable proposal.)

Sure it is a legitimate proposal, and it is not "unreasonable," i.e., 
unconscionable. I'd say that it is unreasonable in the end, though. It 
requires a supermajority to close debate, and any sensible body knows that 
closing debate is a dangerous thing to do, it should only be done when 
necessary. I'd say that if the assembly is at all awake, Previous Question 
will generally fail if there really is a need for further debate.

Yes, the assembly may make the wrong decision if the cloture vote is not 
debated. Frankly, were I chair, I'd probably allow a brief argument against 
the motion, even though it is strictly against the rules. In other words, 
I'd stand for the rights of the minority not to be bulldozed. (What my 
allowing it would mean that I would not refuse to recognize someone who 
rose to speak, and I would not hasten to interrupt if the person tried to 
present an argument against closing debate. But I would probably not allow 
more than a very brief argument before I would proceed to note that the 
motion was not debatable and thus I would cut off the debate on the motion 
to close, thus satisfying the rule in substance while also allowing an 
apparent minority a moment to convince the assembly otherwise.

Note that it is generally true that motions can be reconsidered. I don't 
know all the specific rules, but the general one is that anyone who voted 
for a motion may move its reconsideration. So if it was wrong to close 
debate, all it would take is for those who wanted to present one last 
argument, the one they think is the killer argument that will change the 
outcome, to *any* of those who voted with the prevailing side, and for that 
person to find a second, and if they can do this, they can reopen the 
motion, as if it had never passed. And at this point, a cloture motion 
would be possible but would likely fail, until there had been at least a 
little more debate.

>A third possibility is that entirely different methods for
>conducting meetings would be better than Robert's in at
>least some if not most or even all situations. Now Mr. Lomax
>thinks that describing this possibility is "useless" unless
>I actually propose an alternative method.

Yup. I do. It is totally obvious that it is "possible" that there is a 
better method. But until and unless someone develops the method and someone 
proposes it, that method is indeed useless. Simply suggesting that there 
*might* be a better method and, what? We should spend days or months or 
years -- how long? -- looking for it, meanwhile having no rules, is 
actually to obstruct the process. Robert's Rules can become anything else 
by the consent of a majority (usually it takes a supermajority in theory, 
but the majority can almost always get what it wants if it is a little 
patient.) Adopting Robert's Rules does not in any way foreclose the 
possibility of using alternative rules, either for some occasions, or 
permanently.

And I know plenty of people who think other rules are better. I just think 
that they haven't, in general, experienced the rules properly applied, but 
rather they have seen abuses of the rules, or, alternatively, they did not 
understand what they saw. And so they prefer other rules, which, however, 
can also be abused in ways that Robert's Rules cannot.

Yes, each kind of meeting, ultimately, deserves its own special rules.

>  But that simply
>won't do. The universe of possible major alternatives to
>Robert's may be very large, and the best possible
>alternative may not even have been invented or imagined yet,
>or it may have been invented but has not yet received much
>publicity.

Tell you what. We should stop teaching basic physics to high school 
students, because there may be a better way of organizing out understanding 
of the universe.

I have seen lots of sets of rules proposed -- and being used -- in place of 
Robert's. What I have not seen is these rules working well in large bodies 
(100 is a large body) trying to make binding decisions. For other purposes, 
brainstorming, for example, Robert's are simply irrelevant.

>The problem of searching for better meeting rules and
>methods is best understood as a research problem, not an
>issue that can hope to be resolved through debates on an
>email list. No doubt a lot of research has already been
>done, but probably there is much more that could and should
>be done.

What Mr. Suter does not realize is that he is debating this with someone 
who has been doing such research for forty years.

>  I can easily imagine this becoming the primary
>research subject of some social and behavioral scientists,
>if it is not already.

It is.

>  I am much more interested in finding
>out what such researchers have learned than debating
>Robert's Rules with diehard defenders of them. At the
>same time, if all or most of those researchers agree that
>the defenders of Robert's are probably right, I would like
>to know that as well.

Why not ask them? First of all, this idea about "defenders of Robert's" is 
highly biased. I have substantial experience with Robert's Rules and I tell 
you that your ideas about the rules simply show that you don't understand 
them. And that Robert's Rules do work very well, when understood and 
applied, in common deliberative bodies. This makes me a "diehard defender?" 
Weird.

When a new organization sits down, and I'm part of it, and I think it 
appropriate, I may well "move" that we adopt Robert's Rules. Everyone will 
know what I mean by "move." It is likely that someone will know enough to 
say "I second that." And everyone will know that we can then debate this 
issue. And that after the debate, we will vote. Robert's Rules are common 
parlance. In that environment, though, and even though I thought we had 
debated enough, I would not "Move the Previous Question." Rather, I might 
simply ask, "Does everyone think we have discussed this enough?" and if 
there was no objection, I assume we would proceed to vote.

If my motion does not pass, does Mr. Suter expect that I will immolate 
myself with my copy of the Rules? No, it would be silly to be attached to 
Robert's Rules, which are simply designed to facilitate democracy, over the 
actual democratic decision of the group!

Of course, if the course of events convinces me that this group is going to 
be bogged down in useless and long-winded discussion, short on 
enlightenment and short on accomplishment, I might well decide to put my 
efforts elsewhere....

But if you are interested in affecting political systems in the U.S. or 
similar areas, I'd suggest learning the Rules. You will be hampered if you 
don't. You won't always find that helpful chair, you will sometimes be 
alone, you will need to know how to conduct yourself, to use language and 
procedures that others will recognize. By all means, keep an open mind, 
there may be new ways of doing things that will appear, tradition is not 
always perfection. But there is also usually a reason for it, and 
unreflectively tossing tradition can sometimes be a huge waste of time.