Another Bylaws Motion from the Floor for Next Month's Libertarian Party of Florida Convention:

Submitted moments ago:

The following section shall be added to Article III, Section 4 of the bylaws ("Meetings of the Executive Committee"):

The Executive Committee shall use roll call voting on all substantive motions. On all roll call votes, the vote of each individual Committee member shall be recorded in the minutes. 

The argument for the motion is very simple (and the language, btw, is cribbed from the bylaws of the Libertarian National Committee which, last time I noticed, usually ignores it):

The members of the Libertarian Party of Florida deserve to know how their officers, directors at-large, and regional representatives vote on the business of the party.

When the chair takes a voice vote and rules based on his or her opinion of whether there were more yays than nays, (s)he's probably usually correct (if obviously or even possibly wrong, someone will usually object and ask for a roll call).

BUT: Unless a member has paid close attention to who spoke for or against a motion, or recognizes voices really well, there's not much way to tell which way each member voted. That makes it harder to judge the performance of any given member in view of possibly re-electing that member, or electing that member to another position, or just discussing the member's vote with the member.

I also suspect that some members might vote differently on certain matters if they knew that their votes would be recorded and that they might have to justify those votes later when asked about them. It's easy to do the easy, but wrong, thing if nobody is going to know, isn't it?