LNC Meeting July 2, 2023

We will live blog.

Meeting came to order. Public comments.

Ballot access: Arkansas is advancing. LNC will assist Tennessee to litigate on ballot access issues. North Dakota is soon. New Mexico: It looks that we will need to petition.

Redpath/Nanna asked about North Dakota. How many signatures do they have? Not clear. Ohio can start collecting signatures so soon as they have all the electors. August 8 is a major controversial referendum, thus a very good petitioning date.

Convention Oversight: List of members given. Contest to name the convention theme is advancing. A week left to vote with your dollars. The most expensive convention package is $1500; at least four have been sold in the past few days. Other less expensive packages will be announced. Convention will be 3.5 days for business. We have access to the convention floor for all of Monday the 27th. Three speaker lunches,two speaker breakfasts. 2026 convention: we have pared down the list of potential cities to ten. Information on the Presidential Debate. Final version of the rules will be approved soon. Intent is to provide two Presidential debates, one in March and one at the convention. March debate will perhaps invite candidates from other third parties. There will also be VP debates.

Lainie Huston reports on convention income. We are at a very early stage.

Membership update: Staff thanked for their hard work and getting the June report so quickly. Q Why did total memberships increase from May to June? Signed pledge count — total membership –being examined because it has an anomaly. There are issues with it. There is an issue where dates of signing the pledge were not always recorded directly. The apparent feature is that people who do not check ‘I signed the pledge’ each time they donate can overwrite the record that they signed, leading to a miscount.

Harlos proposes that the count of signed pledges is not significant, and we should not spend much time on it, except for life and sustaining members. She notes that it is relevant for Judicial Committee.

Malagon: Are life members sustaining members? Yes. Life members are a subset of the sustaining members.

Amendments to the policy manual discussed. Possible need for executive session. Moved to amend. The proposal is to amend the rules for using the Libertarian Party trademarks, with restrictions on groups that are not state parties. The amendment had been discussed in closed session. Rules were proposed on the advice of party legal counsel.

Question called. Roll call vote. Duque abstains. Redpath abstains. Vote is 13-0-2, chair remaining silent.

Malagon: Real estate situation? Ford: prices are falling. Facility is highly underused. He supports selling, with money retained as the donors wished. Floor plan unsuitable for a board meeting. Other: can stay in the DC area, but on the outskirts where prices are lower. Also cost of living for staff is challenging. Hagopian: if we sell the building the money must go back to the building fund. FEC and tax rules keep net gain in the building fund. Bowen: prior boards have discussed this. concern with current structure is whether it is suitable for a political party. Cannot raid the till. We should have a location. Something more campus like is good. Current structure is not of value for staff access and parking. Malagon: Some CA members have very strong feelings on the issue. Acting after the Presidential election might make more sense. Might be good to visit the HQ. Harlos:Real estate market down. In the right area, a building works as advertising. That’s not this area.

Malagon urges that the LNC should visit the HQ as a field trip during the DC meeting. Multiple members agree. Timing discussed.

CiviCRM discussed: For any technical platform, it can do whatever we want, but it will cost. There is a challenge with permissions. The CiviCRM data base is very large. Some major issues contributing to slowness identified. Steps: Hire Skvare to implement some of their recommendations, e.f., permissions. There are fundraising challenges. Recommend hiring additional technical staff. First need some baseline development tools.

Nekhaila: Report looked good. Will we keep functions in civi, or will we outsource to some other software for some functions? We’ve spent a lot of money, but it needs to work. Will we use all the report recommendations?

Answer: Need national data gathering process on what civi should do. Get as much feedback as possible. What works poorly? What could be added? Need to identify priorities.

McArdle: Do we need to hire someone to help. A: Yes. Various softwares eg mailchimp do maintain customer information.

Mailchimp, Anedot,…do customer relations. CiviCRM does many things. Civi as set up is a bit clumsy on some issues. Can use some other tools and on occasion roll them back into civi. We need to keep some tools inside the LNC, but need a more formal process for how we incorporate additional processes into our software operations. Q: Is it worthwhile to fix civi or with the same money could we start fresh? Both choices can be good. Harlos: If states are using civi they should be paying for it, at least in some part. Civi could pay for itself by being the payment processor.

Next agenda item: Duque Civi budget recission motion. Was the motion properly noticed and phrased? Chair asks Harlos. Harlos goes on at some length about rules. McArdle: Need a second.

There was a technical obstacle to liveblogging the rest of the meeting. There was a technical obstacle to putting the meeting up on YouTube. When the latter is fixed, we will finish the meeting report. In discussing the CiviCRM update and membership, I did not catch a mention of the drop in membership from May to June. That was 1000 or so members.