The annual IMS Council election results are in! We are pleased to announce that the next IMS President-Elect is Erwin Bolthausen.

This year 12 candidates stood for six places on Council (including one two-year term to fill the place vacated by Erwin Bolthausen). The new IMS Council members are: Richard Davis, Rick Durrett, Steffen Lauritzen, Susan Murphy, Jane-Ling Wang and Ofer Zeitouni. Ofer will serve the shorter term, until August 2015, and the others will serve three-year terms, until August 2016. Thanks to Council members Arnoldo Frigessi, Nancy Lopes Garcia, Steve Lalley, Ingrid Van Keilegom and Wing Wong, whose terms will finish at the IMS Annual Meeting at JSM Montreal.

IMS members also voted to accept two amendments to the IMS Constitution and Bylaws. The first of these arose because this year the IMS Nominating Committee has proposed for President-Elect a current member of Council (Erwin Bolthausen). This brought up an interesting consideration regarding the IMS Bylaws, which are now reworded to take this into account.

The second amendment concerned Organizational Membership. Prior to 2006, IMS offered Institutional Membership, which included two print subscriptions to IMS journals, highly discounted off the regular institutional rate. Institutional membership was to be limited to departments only. However, upon investigation we found several libraries were ordering journals through their department to get this rate. In 2006, we had 111 institutional members. At that time, the IMS changed it to Organizational Membership with the structure outlined here. We successfully transferred most of the former institutional members to institutional subscribers and they therefore paid the appropriate subscription rate. However, in the first year we lost over half of the organizational members, and by 2012 we were down to only five. The IMS focuses well on individual members and institutional subscribers. However, the management of organizational members currently outweighs any benefit. The proposed amendment to the constitution allows the IMS to have organizational members in the future, as desired, but does not require it.

The full Constitution and Bylaws can be read online at https://imstat.org/ims-handbook/. You can read about the candidates at http://imstat.org/elections.