Join

Joining a deliberative body is a procedure, not an audition. A name goes onto the roll, and from that moment the member it belongs to can be recognised, can move, and can vote.

A student stands smiling beside a club table in a school gymnasium. Behind the table a hand-lettered tri-fold board reads MODEL CONGRESS in red and blue marker, with a class code and two QR codes below it; printed leaflets are stacked on the table. The student wears a black T-shirt printed with a photograph of a bearded man in a checked shirt. Other club tables are visible further down the row.
The club table at a fair, board lettered by hand.

Section 1. The roll

The roll is the list of the body's members, and to be a member is to have a name on it. Everything a member can do — be recognised, move, second, amend, vote — follows from that entry and from nothing said at the door. The name is written in, the member is seated, and the body is one larger than it was.

The roll is also what gets called. At the opening of a sitting the clerk reads it, name by name, and the answers establish who is present. On a recorded vote it is read again, and each answer — aye, no, present — is written beside the name it came from.

Section 2. Quorum

A quorum is the number of members who have to be in the room before the body can act, and in most bodies it is a majority of the roll. Short of a quorum the members can meet, talk, hear a report and adjourn, and that is all: nothing can be moved, nothing amended, nothing passed.

That is why the roll matters to everyone on it, not only to the person being added. Every name is part of the number that lets the body do anything at all, and an absence is never neutral — it is one fewer toward the count.

Four students stand together in a school lobby with a staircase behind them. The two in the middle hold up a large hand-painted poster reading JOIN MODEL CONGRESS in blue and red block letters, above a painted eagle and a figure in a blue suit.
A poster the members painted themselves.