We will be holding our 2022 Board Elections at our March General Membership meeting which will be held both in person and virtually (for those who are not able to attend in-person for any reason) on Monday, March 21 at 7 PM. You can register for the Zoom meeting by clicking here. You can vote in the election only if you were a dues-paying member as of our February General Membership meeting. Read on to find out who is running and how to cast your vote.

As previewed at our February General Membership meeting, the Miami Beach Democratic Club will be holding elections for President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer, Parliamentarian and Board of Directors Seats #2, #3 and #4 at the end of our March meeting. This blog post explains the process for voting in those elections—please be sure to read it all the way through. If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected].

The following people are running for each of these positions:

• President: David Geller
• Vice President: Amanda Knapp
• Secretary: Janet Silverman
• Treasurer: Susan Holden
  
• Parliamentarian: Linda Kolko
  
• BOD #2: Steve Hawes
  
• BOD #3: Bill Warren
  
• BOD #4: Tim Johnson
  

See this blog post for candidate biographies.

We will continue to take nominations for these positions until the meeting and from the floor of the meeting before voting begins. Candidates will each have two minutes to introduce themselves to the membership. If you are interested in running for these positions or have any questions about what the position entails, please email [email protected].

We will be using ElectionBuddy again like we did for previous Board of Directors elections to conduct the election presuming that more than one candidate is nominated for the position. If only one person is nominated for each position, we will vote on each position by acclamation, but we want you to be prepared to use ElectionBuddy if needed. ElectionBuddy is a secure voting platform to conduct remote voting, and ensures the integrity and anonymity of our board elections. You do not need an ElectionBuddy account in order to vote in the election—we will provide you with login credentials.

If you are joining us in person, we request that you bring a smartphone or tablet that you can access your email from to be able to vote. We will have some paper ballots as well for those who are not comfortable using their device to vote, but encourage you to vote via ElectionBuddy.

If you are joining the meeting via Zoom, you must be logged into the Zoom meeting in order to vote in the Election (click here to register for the Zoom).

If you cannot attend the meeting in-person or virtually, we recently changed our by-laws to allow for proxy voting, but your proxy MUST attend in person so that they can cast a paper ballot. If this applies to you, please email us at [email protected] and we can discuss how best to accommodate your situation so that you may cast a ballot for the elections.

If we need to use ElectionBuddy, during the meeting each member will receive a link via email to vote for the Board of Directors positions that are contested and will use that link to cast their vote. This means that we need to have a unique email address for each of our members. If you normally share an email address with your partner or spouse and you are both members, please provide us with a current or an additional email address for the purposes of voting by emailing us at [email protected]. To prevent ElectionBuddy emails from going to spam, please add "[email protected]" to your email contacts. If you normally join Zoom meetings with your spouse or partner, you should plan to vote from separate devices.

Presuming that more than one person is nominated to fill this position, you will receive an email from ElectionBuddy with a link to the ballot to vote. Either click on the link in the email or copy the link and paste it into your browser's address bar. This will take you to the ballot. Select the candidate you wish to vote for and click “Verify Your Selection.” This will take you to a confirmation page. Check that your ballot is filled out the way you want and click "Submit" to send your ballot to ElectionBuddy to be counted. You should see a "Thank you!" message appear on the confirmation page.

If you would like to preview ElectionBuddy, we will conduct practice voting before the meeting on Monday, March 21st from 6-7 PM. If you are unable to join us during that time, please call or email Matthew Land (850.445.3428, [email protected]) to arrange an alternate time and date.

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected].