Just carrying over to this thread my faction rant, from http://forums.slcds.info/viewtopic.php? ... 574#p12574
... and continued below, in case we ever take up election law issues again.
Our main reason, I think, for the minimum-faction-size change was that our bizarre poll arithmetic system -- which sounds more like an ersatz ice cream brand than a social technology --- favored by our FIC and enshrined in our law, makes it *very* easy for a small faction to elect one RA member. So much so that if the roughly 80 voters of CDS were distributed as follows:
50 - DPU
5 - CSDF
5 - Simplicitly
5 - NuCare
5 - Social NonDemocrats *
5 - NonSocial Democrats *
5 - Return Ulrika To The Throne *
... there's a fairly good chance that, if there were no minimum faction size, the resulting RA would be really absurdly skewed in favor of the minorities, something like maybe 2 DPU and 1 from 5 of the other 6. How silly.
* * *
Why the current RA perpetuates the HaagenDasz system evades me. It seems to embrace the worst of parliamentary complexity, in its love of minority parties and thwarting of any majority.
If RA members actually voted along faction lines, I suppose I'd be concerned about it.
In fact, the policy differences between factions seem, in CDS, to be so little reflected in action that it matters little.
As I said, above, it's not a hot button issue, as party line voting seems not to influence much in CDS, other than contested Chancellor elections.
In the abstract, though, it's a system in which I can see little virtue. As it is, factions just deny to voters the right to pick their elected reps. Instead we give to factions that power -- they can run and win on a popular person's reputation, and then substitute them by faction act, even for a despised, immature or destructive person, if they wish. I'll likely never really understand it. There was an Elections Commission looking into it, at one point, but it was mostly composed of people invested in the old system so far as I can tell.
By the way, personally, I find the individual contributions of all of our current RA members to be positive and admirable, regardless of faction activity. Nothing wrong with the people. Just a Byzantine system that ensures voters can't directly choose which ones serve, thus avoiding the feared "popularity" system by embracing a worse, "elitists pick their buddies in secret" one.
And time in CDS and SL is precious. Volunteer time. Every hour spent in faction shenanigans is NOT spent in a building workgroup, a Guild, a project, or creating things for and with CDS.
So: if we were designing from scratch: why factions?
== My Second Life home is CDS. Retired after three terms
== as chancellor of the oldest self-governing sims in SL.
I thought the US would change the hour back to be in sync with the rest of the world this Saturday; it is on this Saturday indeed, but not for the next 16 hours or so!
), where the parties define its candidates people can vote for. Total number of votes per party defines how many seats party gets in the parliament and the seats of the party are filled according to the proportional amount of votes the candidates get inside the party. For more information (in clearer language than I am able to produce) can be found, for example, in Wikipedia:
Still, by this far, it has been more an exciting than a negative experience.