goverHow Do We Vote at a Meeting?

There are a number of ways that a group can vote.

The most common is for the chair to ask, “All in favour please signify by saying Aye.” After the group has said Aye then the chair will say “Contrary minded, if any please signify by saying Nay.” And if no one says “Nay” then the motion is carried unanimously. Some groups have a more casual approach they might just say “All in favour” rather than adding the “signify” part.

If the vote is not clear after this approach, likely because there were Ayes and Nays, then the board chair can repeat the process by asking for a show of hands. Hands are easy to count and the group will likely have no trouble agreeing on who has their hands in the air and who does not. You count the ayes first and then the nays and hopefully a decision is reached. If there is a tie, check your rules, but in general that means that the chair must cast the deciding vote.

You can also vote by secret ballot, which is the method used for parliamentary elections in Canada. No one has to know how you voted. The secret ballot is a method that can be appropriate for contentious matters. It is possible that a strong willed board member is attempting to intimidate some of the other board members into voting in according with his or her wishes. A timid board member will be more comfortable voting in secret, than raising their hand with others watching them. Obviously this works better in a larger group. If there are only 5 people voting then it is not as difficult to figure out how people cast their votes.

Another method is by polling. The board chair asks each member, in turn, for their answer on how they are going to vote. This can be very intimidating for some board members. I would not generally recommend this approach. You see it used in criminal trials where the lawyer asks each juror to say whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty. The intent is that some juror will crack under the stress and vote in a different way than they agreed to vote in the juries’ room. Hopefully nothing like that is going on at your meetings and you do not need to use polling.

Polling on Zoom means a different thing. You can set up a poll on Zoom and get a vote in a way that no one knows who voted in favour and who voted against. So, understand that polling on Zoom is not intimidating but in person it can be very scary.

I have talked about these methods pretty much in the order that you would use them. The Aye or Nay approach works nearly all of the time and you would only move to the show of hands if the Aye or Nay was unclear. The secret ballot is most appropriate for contentious or divisive issues and the polling in person would be used only rarely.

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