Nominations, important notification

At the meeting of the Institute Board of Directors held December 8, 1911, the President brought up again the modification in the method of making nominations which had been presented to the meeting of Section officers at the Chicago convention, which modification had been formulated by Acting Secretary Hutchinson. He called attention to the desirability of adding to the present system of nominating officers the feature of advance nomination by petition, so that when the nominating forms go out on February 1st the members will have some guide as to possible candidates, with the result of a concentration in what is at present the extremely large scattering vote. So large has been the scattering vote in connection with nominations for Manager that last year it was distributed among 581 different candidates, and as a result of such scattering the Manager heading the list, received only 4.8 per cent of the vote of the membership. The addition to the present nominating system consists merely in publishing at the time the nominating ballots go out the names of all candidates in favor of whom a petition of fifty names, or the separate endorsement of fifty names, has been received at Institute headquarters by January 25. The proposed plan involved the adoption of the following substitution for Section 18 of the existing by-laws: