September/October 2010: AOA House of Delegates Voting Procedure

Editor:

It was 101 years ago that the AOA saw the wisdom of changing its procedure of voting at annual meetings.  Through the convention of 1910, each member of the Association had one vote at the national House of Delegates. It became apparent to the AOA leadership then that the optometrists who resided or practiced in the area where the convention was held had a disproportionate influence on national issues. The matter was corrected in 1910 when AOA-assigned delegates for each state based on paid membership in the state.  AOA left to the various state associations how their votes were cast.

Pennsylvania does not have a written policy on how its delegate strength is voted. Heretofore, the leader of the delegation, early in the meeting, customarily polled the delegates present to see how the votes should be cast.  Sometimes they were cast proportionately to the number of delegates voting; sometime the unit rule was approved wherein the prevailing side captured all the delegate votes; and sometimes there were unique divisions of the votes. I personally have attended 56 AOA annual meetings, the first being in Pittsburgh in 1946, my very first year of practice. And I have been fortunate to be appointed a delegate at all of the AOA meetings I attended. So I know from personal experience how things were done and I saw firsthand  at the 2009 AOA congress the discouragement of some POA delegates, when the delegates were not polled to see how the votes should be cast.

At Optometry’s Meeting in Orlando in June 2010, I took it upon myself to ask the leaders of eight different state associations about how they split their votes. It was a mixed bag – some divided the votes proportionately the way the present delegates voted and others used the unit rule. However, all of the delegations to which I talked had a policy on how the votes would be cast at the conventions.

It was gratifying to learn that our POA, at its recent convention, created a committee to study the voting procedure used by our delegates to the annual meetings of the American Optometric Association. I hope that the appointed committee members study this issue thoroughly and not be guided by politics as usual. Instead I hope that any new policy that is suggested makes positively clear that each member’s vote is important and each member is treated with courtesy, respect and dignity.

Irving Bennett, O.D.
Beaver Falls