Two boards of members are elected:
- Management board, consisting of President, Vice-president and Treasurer
- Supervisory board, consisting of 3 members
Each board’s mandate lasts 2 years. Exception: 1st mandate of management board elected in year 2015/16 lasts 1 year.
Two boards’ mandates overlap to ensure consistency of Society. Mandate starts on July 1st (exception is the first mandate that starts immediately after elections).
Elections are announced 1 month in advance via internal communication channels and are carried out at regular general assembly that takes place each year in spring.
With the exception of the first assembly, all candidacies can be submitted until the start of the assembly. If there are no candidates, elections are called again in upcoming 6 months and positions of current boards are prolonged. If a member of the board doesn’t want to prolong their mandate, an ‘acting’ member to the board is appointed.
Procedure of elections:
Elections take place in this order: President, Treasurer and Vice-president.
For each position separately and in absence of other candidates, each candidate present themselves. After that, questions and answers take place.
When all presentations are done, the assembly public has a chance to have discussion over candidates in absence of candidates.
Anonymous voting follows. Every member present at general assembly can vote, even the candidates themselves. Two people count the votes and then the winner is announced. This procedure is repeated for all positions.
Current management board makes another unified vote where they rank candidates from most (numbered with 1) to least appropriate candidate in their opinion. They can also give non confidence to inappropriate candidates. They place their vote in an envelope. In case of tie, envelope is opened and the higher ranked of the two candidate gets one more vote and wins the elections. If the envelope was used, one vote is taken away from the candidate who lost so that quorum stays the same. It must never be revealed if the envelope was used or not.
Example: If two candidates had a tie of 25 votes in a quorum of 50, additional vote would make it 26-25 increasing quorum to 51 (and therefore everyone would know the envelope was used). In this case 1 vote is taken from the loosing candidate making the final result 26-24.
Rules of voting:
If there is only one candidate for a management board position or three or less candidates for supervisory board, every member gives a vote of confidence or no confidence, as proposed by the chairman of elections.
If there are more candidates than available positions, each member chooses one preferred candidate for management board and three preferred candidates for supervisory board.
A member is elected on position with a simple majority of votes.
If no one is elected, new elections must be called within next 6 months.