Arnold Smith's irritation, until in 1968 this refusal was over-ridden by the Queen herself The Secretary-General was originally required to submit annual reports to the Heads of Government, but this has since been changed to reporting at biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings (CHOGM). The Secretary-General is held responsible by the Commonwealth's Board of Governors in London. Election Since the 1993 CHOGM, it has been decided that the secretary-general is elected to a maximum of two four-year terms. The election is held by the assembled heads of government and other ministerial representatives at every other CHOGM. Nominations are received from the member states' governments, who sponsor the nomination through the election process and are responsible for withdrawing their candidate as they see fit. The election is held in a Restricted Session of the CHOGM, in which only heads of government or ministerial representatives thereof may be present. The chair of the CHOGM (the head of government of the host nation) is responsible for ascertaining which candidate has the greatest support, through the conduct of negotiations and secret straw polls. There is usually a convention that an incumbent seeking a second term in office is elected unopposed for his or her second term. However, this was broken by a Zimbabwe-backed bid for Sri Lankan Lakshman Kadirgamar to displace New Zealand's Don McKinnon in 2003. At the vote, however, Kadirgamar was easily defeated by McKinnon, with only 11 members voting for him against 40 for McKinnon. At the 2011 CHOGM, India's Kamalesh Sharma was re-elected to his second term unopposed. Sharma had won the position at the 2007 CHOGM, when he defeated Malta's Michael Frendo to replace McKinnon, who had served the maximum two terms. At the 2015 CHOGM, Patricia Scotland, a former British cabinet minister, was nominated for Commonwealth secretary-general by her native country of Dominica and defeated Antiguan diplomat Sir Ronald Sanders and former deputy secretary-general for political affairs Mmasekgoa Masire-Mwamba of Botswana to become the 6th Commonwealth secretary-general and the first woman to hold the post. She took office on 1 April 2016. List of secretaries-general References Secretary-General Secretaries-general