Obviously this was not a big deal for everyone, because we didn’t have a thread about it (aside from this post from Rastlin alluding to someone’s DEI feelings being hurt). Don’t feel bad, it apparently wasn’t a big deal for the vast majority of members either.
For those playing along at home, the vote totals for the last 6 years:
2021 - 2,924 (37.9% of membership eligible to vote)
2022 - 3,070 (37% of membership eligible to vote)
2023 - 2,139 (25.6%)
2024 - 1,636 (22%)
2025 - 1,644 (likely less than 22%, after accounting for membership growth - and this election had a revision of the CAS by-laws on the ballot for approval)
2026 - 1,423 (definitely under 20% based on the 2024 percentage, before accounting for membership growth)
I’m not sure when it finally occurs to CAS leadership that there’s an engagement problem, but a greater than 50% decline in 5 years in the number of people who cast a vote should scream “Arlington, we have a problem.” Then again, I expect them to just draw conclusions off the ~15% of members who are engaged enough to go log in and vote and assume the other 85% of members feel the exact same way. Maybe they can go find the part of the exam that talks about the dangers of drawing conclusions off small samples of data that may not be representative of the total, if they haven’t replaced that with 2-3 more papers on the technical nuances of predictive modeling.
It doesn’t help that their candidate bios are terribly laid-out and don’t give a lot of real insight.
I seem to recall that they were listed like, alphabetically by name, and the link would take you to a long page of all the answers for that candidate. So to compare them side-by-side, I needed to actually pull the windows onto separate screens. I did that once early on, but forgot who I wanted to vote for and didn’t end up doing it again.
Doesn’t feel like the CAS has listened very much, anyway.
This is the first year since i joined that i didn’t vote. And yes, it’s because I’m less engaged. The staff run everything these days anyway, I’m not sure the board matters any more.
Why am I less engaged? Largely it’s because it’s obvious they don’t care about members any more. They barely answer the phone. If you have a problem with a webinar you bought not loading, send an email and maybe someone will get back to you in a few days, with an answer that misses the point. It might take more than a week to fix a problem that, a few years ago, a staff member would have solved for you over the phone in a few minutes.
They used to publish the phone numbers of most of the key staff members. Nope. Gotta protect the staff from members calling them and interrupting their day.
Want to find something on the website? Minutes of a board meeting? An old paper that was in the syllabus when you studied? That stuff isn’t there any longer. How about something really important like the page where you can attest your compliance with the CE requirements? That’s there. Somewhere. Good luck finding it without a link.
(I literally pulled a bunch of old exam papers off the wayback machine a few months ago, because they were no longer available on the CAS website.)
They barely even share member contact info any more. They changed the default to “don’t share”. The last time i changed jobs, I decided it was too hard to update the CAS database anyway. (You can’t type in the name of your employer, you need to find it on their list. And the interface ain’t great.) And besides, if my friends are curious, they can find it on LinkedIn. I never used to value LinkedIn, because the CAS directory was better. Not any more.