Because of publication deadlines, this column is being written before I know the results of this year’s APA election. Not knowing the outcome gives me some freedom, as this allows me to muse on the election without being accused of being biased by the particular outcome.

No matter what the issues or who the candidates, the number of people voting in our annual elections has continued its 20-year downhill trend. We now hover at about 35 percent of our membership voting. It’s difficult to know what this means, since we really don’t know which of our members vote. I’ve heard just about as many theories as there are members to explain this phenomenon. Some say this or that particular constituency or subgroup of psychiatrists don’t vote or are more likely to vote than other members. I’ve also heard people say that this represents disaffection with, or general approval of, the way our Association is functioning.

Depending on whom I’ve talked with in any one week, I could make nearly any argument and base it on recent evidence from communications with members. But, really, we don’t know the answer. When only 25 percent of eligible voters vote for the president of the United States, I guess we could claim victory in that we have a higher percentage of members voting in our Association election than we do in the general election. I get little solace from this point of view, though.

Another argument is that our colleagues are so busy with their daily professional lives that they really have little interest in how the Association is governed. All they are interested in, this argument goes, are the results. This year provides an interesting study of this point, but it also illustrates some of the problems for those of us committed to ensuring that APA remains as democratic an organization as we can make it.

We have had, by APA standards, a massive campaign to educate our members about the importance of voting on APA’s corporate reorganization. This was not an easy task, since if you’re like me, reading bylaw revisions and spending time poring over legal documents is not high on my list of enjoyable activities. But the APA elected leadership cannot change the bylaws without membership approval.

Thus, we have a situation in which the vast majority of members claim to be interested in devoting more APA resources to advocacy and public education (and this has been found in every survey and focus group of every APA strategic-planning group for over a decade), yet because of our corporate structure, the Board can’t move without a change in the bylaws.

And, as you’re probably sick of hearing by now, the bylaws can’t be changed unless one-third of the voting members vote and two-thirds of that group vote in favor of the change. So, because it is typical that bylaw revisions receive fewer votes than the ballots for officers (in fact, there’s a falloff in voting for everything after the president-elect is voted on), we usually end up needing somewhat more than one-third of the votes to be returned to have the appropriate number to make the results valid for bylaws and constitutional changes.

How to address this dilemma has been dealt with by many other professional organizations, which grant their boards of trustees the authority to make bylaw changes. In fact, we included this provision in our new bylaws (including a provision for membership reversal of the Board’s actions) based on what we had learned from other professional associations similar to ours. Unfortunately, some have argued, inappropriately I believe, that this represents some sort of power play by the Board of Trustees to accrete more power to the Board. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The Board’s sole motivation was to allow it to act expeditiously in the interest of our members when necessary.

If, for example, the APA Board could have converted the Association from a 501(c)(3) to a 501(c)(6) itself, it would have done so two years ago. This would have freed up more dollars almost immediately to go for government relations and public education work. It is heartbreaking to receive, as I do, regular requests from district branches to fight, for example, psychologist-prescribing legislation in their states, but to have severe constraints placed on how much help APA can give in these situations because of our corporate status.

This discussion may be moot because the bylaws changes may have been approved by the membership, but I can assure you that the outcome wasn’t clear during the election period. As I write this—one week before the voting deadline—we still have not received 33.3 percent of our members’ ballots. If this percentage is not reached, we are already in the process of planning for a special ballot to be sent out to try again. We’re doing this because we can’t afford not to change our corporate structure.

Some have argued that our members’ nonparticipation in APA elections represents a failure of leadership. This may be true to some extent, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. This year, the Board carried out its leadership responsibilities and did its best to make sure that all of our members knew it. True, it occurred in a context in which some segments of our membership have been dissatisfied with the inaction of previous years. But, this year there was action.

I don’t think the questions regarding leadership pertain just to the APA Board of Trustees, however. Over the last several years, I have attended meetings of many of our district branches and state societies. I must tell you that when 10 percent of the membership attends one of these events, everyone is thrilled at the good turnout. Is this a good turnout? In some ideal world, probably not, but maybe it is in the world in which we live today.

Over the last four years, there has been a clear shift in the approach the Board of Trustees takes to leading our Association. The actions of our medical director, Steve Mirin, to change the culture in which our Washington, D.C.-based staff operates have paralleled this shift. That is not enough, though.

Democracy is a two-way street, and we have to continue to work on better understanding the reasons our members don’t participate in the Association at every level. Participation in our national elections provides only a glimpse at the level of member engagement, and it does nothing to help us understand why. We’ve got to keep working on it, and I’d be interested in hearing your ideas. Let me know.