Well, I wouldn't go so far myself, Beathan. We'll obviously review this later on the SC meeting, but I can imagine that almost all parties have, indeed, committed slight irregularites here and there. The issue is really to understand if these were done [i:l47ofss8]deliberately[/i:l47ofss8] or by any other reason — lack of time, failure to understand certain tiny but annoying rules, etc. For the record, some parties (CARE among them) did actually approach me (other parties might have approached other members of the SC, I don't know) to try to clarify some of the campaigning issues and other details. In my mind that shows a clear intent on clearing any issues and making sure that all parties (again, CARE included) wish to be 'clear' by election day.
We can get bogged down in technicalities, but so far, the only party to be ever excluded from the elections was for lack of members (not even 3). The other 'minor details' were always sorted out in time. Of course, if this starts to become an 'abuse' (and not mere neglect/ignorance), it might be grounds for exclusion, but I sincerely don't feel this was the case. People eager to explain themselves, getting in touch with others to clarify issues, asking questions about procedures (in private and public) cannot be so easily 'dismissed' as being 'evil wrongdoers'.
Obviously the SC might have other views than mine, but I feel particularly uncomfortable in having parties disqualified with mere trifles. Also, one must also consider the limitations of the SL group tools, which have also evolved over time. For instance, in the past, the Groups listed [i:l47ofss8]publicly[/i:l47ofss8] all members in them. Now you can turn this feature off, so it's harder to "validate" parties based only on the members they show in their lists. The "requirement" for having a SL group specifically for voting purposes was two-fold: allowing a way to automatically check if a member was a valid faction member for ranking purposes (unfortunately, this is not so easy to script as it was thought at that time, although it's not impossible) and to easily count how many members a party has (to be able to fill a majority of votes in the RA, in the case they were elected). Since the group tools were changed, and our legislation was not adapted to that change, there is now a slight discrepancy of what the Constitution intended and what the new group tools allow.
There is no question that a faction can have citizens and non-citizens, since there is good precedent for that (Ulrika's old SDF had, indeed, many more non-citizens than citizens), although the requirement for "All faction members must be citizens" in the Constitution should be read to meant that a [i:l47ofss8]CDS faction is comprised of CDS citizens[/i:l47ofss8] and that the articles in the Constitution regarding voting, ranking, limits and rights, do only apply to CDS citizens, and not to non-CDS citizens. In a sense, we cannot neither discriminate against non-citizens willing to participate in a party, nor do we have any jurisdiction telling non-citizens what they should do. All we can establish are the rights and duties of [i:l47ofss8]citizens[/i:l47ofss8] who are members of a faction created for the purpose of running for elections in the CDS.
It might [i:l47ofss8]have[/i:l47ofss8] been better if CARE had [i:l47ofss8]two[/i:l47ofss8] groups — "CARE" and "CARE for CDS" to make the separation more clear. However, this might be contrary to the spirit of allowing people to form their own associations and run them in the manner they like. Again, we're discussing lots of technicalities here, both related to the right of freedom of association and the way the SL groups work. What is quite clear is that [i:l47ofss8]only citizens of the CDS will be able to rank and vote in the elections[/i:l47ofss8]. The rest is muddy — and I hope that our meeting later is able to clarify this issue and provide some guidelines.