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...A Short Guide for New State Chairs
Our Libertarian National Committee is composed of four National Officers and five At-Large members, chosen by all delegates at the National Convention, and eight or nine Regional Representatives, chosen by groups of states.
A Region is entitled to have a Regional Representative if at least 10% of the party's members live in the region, two Representatives, if 20% of the members live in the region, and so forth. California, by itself, can be a region, because >10% of our members live in California, but other states must group together to form a region. The actual number of Regional Representatives is determined by how states agree to form Regions, but historically there have been eight or nine Regional Representatives.
Region formation is entirely voluntary by the states agreeing to form the Region. There are no Bylaws assigning states to regions. You get to form Regions every two years, during the three months before the National Convention, though you can negotiate the details in advance. You make your agreement, the State parties all sign the agreement, and you have a Region. If you choose not to join a region, or if your State Party does not get around to joining a Region in time, you can be an independent State.
If you do not agree to do something else, at some point during the National Convention the delegates from the states in the region get together and elect their Regional Representative and the Regional Alternate. These meetings have sometimes been held in front of the elevators; informing delegates about them has sometimes been a bit haphazard. You don't have to do it that way.
You can plan out in advance which states are or are not in your region. You are under no obligation to stay in your current region. In forming a "double region", you may find that the natural division of states (say, the current region 5 North and South) divides so that one end has >10% of the members, the other end has <10% of the members, but you can still agree that the delegates from the two halves of the region each separately choose a Regional Representative.
Everything else can be done by mutual agreement of the states involved, so long as the details are specified in the formation agreement, such as agreements as to how many votes each state gets in choosing a Representative or Alternate, where the Representative and Alternate must come from, how the Representative and Alternate may be replaced, etc.
It is always sensible to look at the Region you might be joining and ask whether the Region makes sense, and whether the credible choices of Regional Representative are acceptable. For example, if your Regional Representative has never contacted your state or filed a report in the LNC Minutes about what is happening in your Region, you might want to consider what you want to do.
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Gold America Group