Jamie --
Thanks for your comment, but I disagree with your position. There is far more at stake than mere "ballot stuffing" in a move to "fee based citizenship."
First, moving to fee based citizenship would transform the CDS into just another democratic debating society. There are already many such groups in SL and RL. These groups tend to commit the worst sins of Robert Kennedy -- dreaming of things that are not and cannot be.
One of the greatest things about the CDS is that we are not just a chatting group -- we are an experiment in virtual government. To govern we must govern something. We have our sims for this purpose. We need our sims for this purpose. Without the sims, we would have nothing to govern.
The fact that we are running sims keeps us grounded and practical -- freeing us from the excesses of talk groups. Further, our sims provide an alternative to the usual anarchy of the mainland and centralized authoritarianism of the islands (even if that authoritarianism is mitigated by competition of landlords for tenants). We govern ourselves by governing our space -- and we would lose that in a fee system.
Second, if we preserved our sim-governance, but allowed nonresidents to become citizens, then we would create an inequitable and untenable power imbalance. Those of us who own property in the sim would have far more in jeopardy from government decisions than those citizens who didn't own property -- but we would no no more say in how our property is regulated or otherwise affected. This creates a political version of the "free-rider" problem.
The only way I see to protect landowning residents from the new fee-citizens would be to devolve land management tasks onto new, local governments. That is, we would have to create a new level of government and the current government would have to relinguish control over the land (completely -- without check) to these new, local governments. This would complicate our governmental structure -- which, as many have observed, is already a bit too complicated for a population our size. Also, it would not solve the first problem -- that the CDS Federal government would become nothing other than a buy-in think-tank and talking group.
I am already a member of such groups in SL and RL outside the CDS. I joined the CDS because it was different -- and wonderful in that difference. The fee-based citizenship proposal would destroy the very thing that makes the CDS unique and valuable (that it is an experiment in [i:34xsxwtt]virtual but practical politics[/i:34xsxwtt]).
Beathan
Let's keep things simple enough to be fair, substantive enough to be effective, and insightful enough to be good.
I prefer the Commedy of Errors 
That's why I keep reading your posts 
