[Draft] Amendment to clarify elections and candidacy

These corrections have been made.

This may need to be discussed more. I'm just of the opinion that if someone is serious about pursuing a different office, they ought to be free of their current obligations, rather than playing the win-win card of vying for another office from their current seat. It shows a level of commitment.

This is covered by the fact that if the second call for candidacy fails to produce a challenger, the single candidate selected by the WAD wins the election by default. I may need to clarify the language.

 

There will be a few linguistic alterations in the current Constitution to fit this amendment in, due to its current structure.

In another amendment, I'd like to cover the actual Amendment process itself. However, I've tried to limit the scope of this amendment draft to cover, specifically, the election process.

 

Forgive my ignorance, but I do not see "regional pardon" defined in the Constitution as written or as prospectively amended. Who can issue a regional pardon? The Founder? The WAD? The Supreme Court? The Legislature? It seems like this should be specified, unless I'm missing something.

 

No forgiveness necessary. I agree, the Court system itself also needs to have some work done on it. However, I'm trying not to do a complete overhaul with this amendment alone. Consider it a suggestion for necessary future legislation.

 

The pardon power is an executive order that should be reserved for the executive, i.e. the WAD. However, this power should not be so easily accessed as to allow swift pardons to those who violate the law. Pardons should be subject to the following:

1. The executive is not obligated at any time to grant a pardon.
   
2. The individual in question must request said pardon.
3. The requester must wait for a set duration of time before a pardon can be given if issued after a convicted of a crime.
   1. A pardon may be granted earlier if issued before a conviction
   2. Pardons do not overturn convictions.
4. The pardon power does not defer to another officer if the executive is indisposed.
5. Individuals are not obligated to accept a regional pardon issued by the executive.

 

However, like Lun Noir said, the rules regarding how pardons work don't necessarily have to be put into this particular amendment.

 

As a general note, suggested corrections are denoted by strikes for omissions while bolded and underlined for changes. Points of discussion use colored text.

Are we assuming that there will be only one article prior to this one? I think Elections should be article III because defining citizenship and inherent rights of membership should be article I and then the description of government positions should be article II. Article IV needs to be an amendment process....

I think coordinator is a more apt description than conductor for some reason. I am concerned that WAD elections are not subject to the regulation in red text as I believe the coordinator of the WAD elections should always put the candidates in alphabetically order when posting about the election even if there is no official ballot per say. Also in section 1, you put "or issue at hand" which should be omitted because this article specifically focuses on elections. This language should be kept for an amendment article. You missed a period at the end of section 2; I bolded and underlined it though it is still difficult to see.... In section 3, let's use the official title of the regional court and "or hold office" needs to be omitted because it is out of the scope of this article. I think such language should be kept for a future article describing the government positions and the qualification to hold the positions. I think that the orange text should be omitted from this article as well because it discusses the qualifications for holding an office(s) which is outside the scope of this article. The blue text is what we need to discuss at some point because I believe both the WAD election and the general elections are going to need these things. My first proposal on the subject, the Minister of Foreign Affairs should be the coordinator of the election.

Since this article will be after the article describing the government positions, I think that maintaining the abbreviation POL throughout the article is fine. Lun, you are going to explain the red text to me further because if it is subject to chronological order then shouldn't the first player issuing the nomination always be ineligible? So why have the "Players issuing or seconding" clause? The orange text has the problem of the size of the window. There is a 5 day window followed by WAD selecting someone followed by a questionable sized window for the Legislature to counter. The blue text is about what happens in the event of a tie in the general election. You discussed a tie in the primaries however a tie is also possible in the generals, so we need to account for that just in case; no matter how unlikely. My final thought relates to all my strikeouts of the phrase "of the election," as once it is used to describe the coordinator at the beginning of the section then it is not needed each time you reference the coordinator.

 

I do not believe granting a pardon should be within the power of the WAD. This system seems to work much like the Arbiter and Supreme Court system. In the sense that the Delegate banjects someone, the player sends a request to the Arbiter which contacts the SC to rule on the banjection. If in favor, the nation remains banjected while against the banjection sends a request to the WAD to un-banject the nation. Maybe these pardons should be handled by this same system rather than making a completely new one.

 

Thank you for that thorough review, Acario. I've made revisions as suggested. For completeness sake, some of this was discussed further between myself and Acario in IRC.

This draft also includes the first stab at revising the WAD election process. There may be room for improvements there.

 

So Lun, I believe I have reworked this section to fall more in line with the challenge system already in the constitution while maintaining some of the aspects found in the general election process. I have also written in clauses to account for possible WAD resignation like what happened with Kaputer. I do not know if I like the whole specific days thing that was setup in the constitution but I kept with it so everything happens on Mondays and Fridays. Do you think that the nomination system should be used with WA Delegate elections? What are your thoughts in general? This is the first time we will be discussing the topic after all.

The change in bold is a nice addition because it allows the POL go less than 5 plays if the regions does not have enough nations to fulfill the requirement of 5 nations.

 

Updated the draft.


With the WAD elections, I do still think that nominations should take place. Again, my concern is with people who just sit and gather endorsement and then out of the blue issue a challenge. However, I'm not sure how it fits in exactly with challenging. Might sound odd, but personally I would like to see term-based elected positions have a call for candidacy come up each time a term was served. Might be that a WAD receives no opposing candidates and just retains his seat by default. Would also generate more activity, awareness about the government, and a clearer democracy. It also may help stimulate elected officials to remain constant in their activity because of the perpetual, scheduled challenge.

To be blunt, I think the challenge system is flawed. Might just be me, but it seems to create this perception in my mind that the challenger is arrogantly stomping up to shove the incumbent out of the way, and inherently makes the incumbent appear more sympathetic. I actually say this from experience, because in the election I was involved in for the position of POL, I found that the procedure of challenging' her just created the wrong tone even in my own mind. To explain further, it is such a fine line, but 'wanting to run for a position' is different from 'wanting to replace someone in a position'. A term-based call for candidacy creates the first perception, challenging creates the second perception.

Additionally, as we discussed in IRC, I dislike the way the WAD position is elected. However, due to the way NS uses Endorsements, this is really one of the only ways of handling it without the potential for long stretches without an executive delegate. For the purposes of regional stability, I'm not willing to rock that boat yet for a more representative and fair vote.

 

I'm inclined to agree. Running for office should not automatically be seen as an affront to the service of the incumbents, but rather an effort of a different individual to get more involved with the region and offer a fresh perspective.

 

Lun_Noir, I know we discussed the stigma that the challenge system imposing on the on IRC and I completely agree; however, after rereading my proposed changes to section 4 again, I think I already solved this problem... Here is a repost:

If you notice, the challenge system is used however the challenger does not have to publicly express his challenge. He only has to send a TG to the MoFA and WAD. We could change this clause to say that the challenger sends his request to the AG instead to protect his identity while the AG informs the MoFA and WAD of the need for a WAD election. This way the challenger does not have to reveal his identity.... as long as more than one person takes the call for candidacy. This system could work as a way to keep challenges for the POL election. In the event that the AG is challenged, the challenge would have to be sent to someone else. The benefit of such a system is that besides the 90 day minimum term the player could hold the position for as long as the community is satisfied with their performance. This would surely make elections less frequent than once a month.

The other system Lun and I discussed on the IRC, is the idea of a staggered mandatory election cycle. Since the WAD, POL and AG have minimum of 90 days in office we would make that a maximum length of a term and force an election when the 90th day is reached. The incumbent can run to keep the office indefinitely. The elections would have to be staggered so that all the election are not occurring at once. So the first month elects a WAD, the second month elects a POL and the third month elects an AG. Then this election cycle repeats. The benefits of such a system is the removal of the challenge system or any possible stigma from challenging and that the regional power changes hands quite often. As a consequence, the region will be placed in a almost perpetual election. The first two weeks of every month will go through a call for candidates and elections while the last two weeks of every month will be prepping for the next election or going through Justice elections. This process could be especially cumbersome on the first month where the WAD is elected after two weeks and then puts his appointed MoFA and MotI in front of the Legislature for a Yay or Nay vote. In short, I guess these problems could be solved by a increasing the term length. While I know everyone enjoys a good election, I am sure people will be tired of perpetual elections and perpetual TGs asking for a vote.

These are my first two possible solutions to the challenging and the WAD election.

 

Acario: Another option would be to extend (maybe even double) the length of a term, so that we would see an election every two months?

Historically speaking, what is the shortest term someone has served before challenge?

 

Since electing a WAD is a more recent addition, there is not enough data to give a confident answer to the shortest term length. Even the POL and GA positions, historically speaking, were never really challenged and changes only occurred when the holder of the position stepped down. So, my answer is a really long time... Quantitative enough?

I did mention the possibility of increasing the term length in my post as well. When we were drafting the current constitution, we originally had the term length as half a year; however, outrage came from this so we compromised to a 90 day term. You will still find many people are against the 90 day term as well since the party against the 120 day term supported a 60 day term. The 90 day term is a compromise between the two camps. I doubt people will be in favor of increasing it and will especially be against doubling.

 

A fair enough point.

Although, if cyclical elections were set up and people were tired of elections and thought the current seated official were doing a suitable job, no candidates would be named in the call for candidacy and the month would pass with no election. It's a bit of a balance, admittedly, but from a completely technical point of view, there is nothing in the current rules preventing challenges against each of these positions every 90 days.

Perhaps we could trial it with the Arbiter and POL positions.

Edit: After thinking about this further, it may be best to tackle the term limits / challenge issue for another proposal.

 

I agree with tackling the term limits later; however, the challenge system needs to be worked out now as the current constitution uses a public challenge announcement as the announcement to begin the election cycle for WAD, POL and AG.

 

In that case, I agree with your statement that a challenger can inform the WAD in the case of the POL and AG positions, and for a WAD challenge, the challenger informs both the MoFA and WAD.

 

What do you think about the above changes for Section 5 Announcement? It adds a part discussing the challenge of the POL and AG.

 

I like it and have incorporated it into the draft.

Have given it a fresh read over and am pretty happy with it at this point. Going to give a pass over the current Constitution and see which areas will require a linguistic adjustment to support this.