My friends in political science used to talk a lot about “roll call voting” analysis over lunch in Perry Cafeteria at Mississippi State University. I was a member of the Faculty Forum who held a reserved anteroom for lunch in this beautiful arched building. I learned a lot from experts in other disciplines that a situation to discuss them might have not presented itself otherwise. On roll call voting in Congress, unless the body excuses itself from such an explicit vote, the Clerk records how each House or Senate member voted on a piece of legislation or rule change or other formal matter before the body. The results of such studies reveal how patterns of block-voting occur, whether on all issues or on certain ones.
Many issues in the American Radio Relay League have centered on how a given Division Director (aka Board of Director member) voted on a Bylaw change or some other matter. More recently, it has been the pattern of “block voting” by various coalitions on the Board of Directors that has received intense scrutiny by members, many of who simply walked out the door on continued membership. League minutes tend to be very vague in the narrative communicated to members after the fact. My colleague, Dan KB6NU, has written on this. The great obscurity in just finding out how a give Director represented the Division prevents informed voting during the next election. This reduces civic engagement in the ARRL and in the hobby. It also causes a great deal of conflict in the hobby among U.S. hams but such is almost inevitable when the cloud of secrecy hangs over a membership organization.
Since there is great interest in how League Directors do their business, I asked a fellow ham who shares this interest in Congressional roll call voting to independently compile data on recent Board member voting behaviors. This was so that I would not unintentionally “cherry pick” issues for this analysis. S/he prefers to remain anonymous because of the positions s/he holds but feels that transparency such as this is important for the League.
These issue and voting data were compiled from ARRL minutes pertaining to formal matters deliberated over 2024-2025. For each issue contained in the table below, there is an embedded link to the ARRL website for the source in the legend at the bottom. We think that this information will be useful for the sake of transparency in the conduct of League matters. If the reader does not think such posts are a good thing, there are many cat videos available for watching on Youtube. However, note that I have not independently verified these data. Readers who disagree with the independently compiled results in the table can look them up using the embedded links on their own.
Summary Tabble of Recent Roll Call Votes
(PDF is zoomable and scrollable)
This table is available for downloading in PDF and Excel formats below.