Dear citizens,
This is the final draft for the recommendations of the Election Commission. I'd appreciate if the participants would be so nice as to review it to make sure I didn't do anything wrong! Also, I'm sure that additional comments will be welcome, even from citizens that didn't participate on the in-world meetings.
Some notes:
1. There are two alternatives presented for the date for the first RA meeting. No consensus was found between the alternatives. The RA will have to pick the one they prefer.
2. There were just filler spaces listed for the dates for the Chancellor election, and I promised to the commission that I would look the dates up and just fill it. It happens that there is a rather precise language on the Constitution to define the formula for the dates. So instead of using the suggestion in the previous draft document, I just copied & pasted the terms already in the Constitution. However, there is a catch: RA members announce their candidacy to the Dean of the SC, while the candidates to Chancellor announce their candidacy to the LRA!! This means that although it was the wish of this commission to have the Chancellor & RA campaign and elections to coincide precisely on the February term, this will only happen if RA and SC are in sync with the dates. None of this was reviewed by the commission, so I appreciate any comments!
3. Unfortunately, when looking at the dates suggested for the first RA meeting (because we all assumed this would get fixed on the final revision), I have found out that this changes more things than I thought and might even require a constitutional change. Previously, elections would finish two weeks before the new term, as set by the Constitution — but the SC overrode that for the 12th term. Now we're suggesting that the term begins either on the day after elections or a week later. This requires changing the wording on the Constitution, and not merely passing a new law. Sorry about that. The RA will have to do the extra work
Cheers,
- Gwyn
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1. Explaining the voting system better
It was found out that STV is not really well-understood by most, and although an open-source tool exists for validating the results (OpenSTV, used by the Dean to validate the last elections), explaining how the system works is beyond the abilities of most.
This commission suggests that volunteers, knowledgeable about the STV, write a short voters' guide explaining how the ranking influences the result, to be published on the CDS Portal and the Official CDS Forums
Due to the inherent complexity of STV, this commission will research alternative voting methods this term and report to the RA.
2. Campaigning and Role of the SC in the election process
It was felt that the role of the SC in the election process should just be limited to overseeing the campaigning. This leads itself to the following bill:
Campaigning Act
1. Campaigning starts officially two weeks before the last election day.
2. Campaigning ought to be supervised by the SC as they see fit, trying to keep a balance between limiting spam and allowing free access of candidates to do their campaigning. The RA might pass further legislation regarding campaigning, to be enforced by the SC.
3. Candidates would be allowed ONE group notice, with an attached notecard, announcing their candidacy and stating their platform; no further campaigning/political group notices are allowed. However, if candidates wish to "sponsor" a general event and use it to raise awareness as candidates, that's fine — as an event, it will be announced as usually on any official CDS channels for communication.
4. Each candidate should be allowed to post their own notice.
5. The Executive should collect notecards/pictures from candidates and set up a board (possibly at several locations) where citizens can learn about what the candidates stand for and organize events where citizens can fairly meet all candidates.
3. Leader of the Representative Assembly (LRA), Citizen Eligibility and Election Dates
The issue to be discussed is that the appointment/election of a new LRA is not codified in law now that we're using a STV system. Traditionally, the LRA was "the candidate with the most votes" (who, under St. League, was also a member of the winning faction). Since we have no more factions and STV doesn't translate the results directly into a "candidate with most votes", a difficulty was created — the LRA is the person in charge for managing all meetings for the RA since Day One, but if the first meeting is the one that actually appoints a LRA, this method is flawed.
Recent discussions at the Scientific Council also rejected the SC's interference with the RA's meeting schedule as being unconstitutional.
Thus, a proposal was made for codifying more precisely the dates after the election (other dates, like the citizen roll call, the dates for announcing candidacy, and the actual election dates, were already codified in law):
New Term Act
1 (Alternative A) The last day the voting booths are open is always a Saturday (until noon). The newly elected Representative Assembly will automatically meet on the Saturday on the next week at noon, unless the newly elected RA members decide, by majority, in the 24 hours following the closing of the voting booths, to meet at a different date, which cannot be set beyond 10 days after the voting booths were closed. [no consensus on this recommendation, thus the alternative below]
1 (Alternative B) The last day the voting booths are open is always a Saturday (until noon). The newly elected Representative Assembly will automatically meet on Sunday at noon [24 hours after the voting booths closed], unless the newly elected RA members decide, by majority, in the 24 hours following the closing of the voting booths, to meet at a different date, which cannot be set beyond 10 days after the voting booths were closed. [no consensus on this recommendation, thus the alternative]
ADD. Candidates for the Leadership of the Representative Assembly should publicly announce their intentions on the offical CDS forums before the election booths open [no consensus on this recommendation — proposed by Solomon Mosely].
2. The agenda for the first term meeting mandatorily includes:
a) Inauguration Ceremony with Administration of the Oath to the newly elected Representative Assembly members by the Dean of the Scientific Council;
b) Election of the new Leader of the Representative Assembly, who will immediately chair the meeting;
c) State of the Nation address.
3. The Inauguration Ball will be held on the weekend of the first RA meeting for the new term.
4. Chancellor election
This point was the one that received many fundamental changes. The following proposal will probably require a lot more discussion, but an approach was made to turn the CDS into a presidentialist system, where the Chancellor becomes elected by universal suffrage, and not by a college of electors.
One of the reasons for the proposed change is to deal better with a factionless Representative Assembly. The previous model relied on the assumption that the winning faction would in effect nominate the Chancellor, as is the case in most parliamentary systems, thus having a RA-friendly Chancellor for a term. With the abolishment of factions, that model does not make sense.
Chancellor Election Act
Constitutional changes:
Art II, Section 5 - Deleted and replaced with:
1. The Chancellor of the CDS shall be elected by universal suffrage of all citizens from among any CDS citizen who shall make application to the RA.
2. The Chancellor will serve a term ending with the election of the next Chancellor.
3. The Chancellor may not be elected to or serve on the Representative Assembly, nor serve on the Scientific Council. The Chancellor may hold a position in the Artisanal Collective but may not vote therein.
New Law:
1. Chancellors are elected for a 12-month term and cannot hold two terms in succession. Term starts simultaneously with the Representative Assembly February term.
2. Any citizen may become a candidate by declaring themselves by a message to the Leader of the Representative Assembly, two weeks before the voting booths open. On the next day, all applicants will be listed by the LRA, and campaigning begins one week before the voting booths open. Elections shall be held over a 168 hour period beginning at noon SLT on the Saturday before the 16th of the month prior to the new Chancellor taking office. In the event of a server outage which prevents citizens from casting ballots and which lasts more than 12 hours, the Dean of the SC has the authority to adjust or extend the election schedule. The new term will start on February 1. [not reviewed by the commission and rewritten to comply with the existing language on the constitution for the RA members]
3. In case the Chancellor leaves its office or is removed from it mid-term, a special Chancellor by-election will be immediately called for by the RA, which will open new applications on the day notice was given and close applications after a week. [present in the last draft but not discussed by the commission]
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Note that the suggestion of a 12-month term for the Chancellor follows the recommendations on the next item. This will mean that candidates for the Chancellorship will present the budget as part of their campaigning, and thus also attract votes depending more on the kind of things they want to implement during their office (and less on their ideology).
4. Suggesting a limit of successive mandates
The reason why no term limits were set in the CDS was due to the historically very low number of volunteers interested in participating in Government; on the other hand, this gave citizens the perception that always the same people are in power with little rotativity, thus discouraging their participation. As the CDS increased its population, the objection against limiting terms seems to have weakened. This commission thus proposed the following bill:
Term Limits Act
No directly elected office in the CDS Government can be held by the same citizen more than two terms in succession, except for the Chancellor, who cannot hold more than one.
On the other hand, the major issue found by this commission is not really about "people in power who remain in power", but in a perceived abuse of power — expressed through incivilities in public, for example — to officials who have repeatedly been elected. Thus, this commission also recommends that the Scientific Council creates a new forum for discussion on ethics.