Comments from Jim Chmilar on the voting process

Richard: lets straighten out one of your misleading statements. People can submit comments with any vote (affirmative, negative or abstaining) and those comments will be considered by the task group. People who submit a “negative” must have (1) a written comment on the document, preferably including a technical explanation and justification, and (2) include a suggested revision or action that would serve to resolve the negative.



Paragraph 3.6.9.3 of the NACE Technical Committee Publications Manual states, “When more than one-third (1/3) of all ballots returned from the STG List, excluding abstentions, are negative, the proposed standard shall be returned to the Task Group for further consideration followed by a second STG ballot.” In this ‘further consideration” the task group is not required to respond to the individual comments because we are not processing a valid approved ballot.



When the ballot does receive 2/3 affirmative votes, so it passes, the path forward to publication requires that 90% of the voters are in favour of the document. Some people call that resolving the negatives if the ballot gets between 67% and 90% affirmative. If in resolving the negatives technical changes are made to the document, I believe it gets re-balloted to the Voting Pool. If I remember correctly in the last major revision in 1991-93 there were something like 19 re-ballots. Some of the rules on re-ballots have changes since then.



Actually if a ballot comes back with over 90% approval, all submitted comments on that ballot still need to be considered. A re-ballot is different and I believe 90% affirmative on a re-ballot means the Voting Pool has approved the document for publication. It is all in the TCPM which is available on line.



We have some 391 people registered to vote on this document and I do hope we get a better percentage voting this time; last time total votes were only 270.



That’s it for me till Conference, got to spend the next week with the family out of the country celebrating some birthdays.

Regards

Jim Chmilar

TG 360 Chair