A Bare Majority

A group can run its own affairs by vote and still break itself apart by voting badly. Picture a business meeting about moving the meeting to a new building. Twenty people come; eleven vote yes, nine vote no, and the eleven call it settled and start packing. Nobody asked what the nine needed. Three weeks later the nine are meeting on their own in the old room, and the town has two half-groups where it had one. Bill W. saw this coming (A.A. pamphlet P-17, p. 29). Writing in 1946 about whether groups should pay for clubs, he set down a principle that reaches every group vote: "But the majority ought not to try to coerce the minority into supporting clubs they do not want or need." Coerce means force. Later, when A.A. built its service structure, it designed elections around the same danger (A.A. Comes of Age): "Another prime cause of grief was the hotly contested close election, which nearly always left behind a large and discontented minority." The Long Form gives each group "no other authority than its own conscience" (Big Book, p. 563), and the whole room is that conscience, not the winning side of a count. Test it tonight: at your next business meeting, before a close vote is called, ask whether the group has talked long enough.