Miscellaneous Ideas To Consider

[Purple State]

This thread is *only* for ideas that do not pertain to form of government or anything of the sort. This means issues that may be stragglers to be addressed after a government is established. I will list the current ideas mentioned and will continue to update the list as delegates think of important matters throughout the Convention.

Anyone, delegate or non-delegate, may propose ideas for this list as it is informal. Seconding motions is not required.

Ideas to be addressed:

• Revisiting the regions
• Can people change states/regions? When?
• Do we restart the voter rolls or continue as is?

[Senator MaxQue]

• Do we restart the voter roles or continue as is?

I suppose than you mean rolls and not roles.

[Purple State]

• Do we restart the voter roles or continue as is?

I suppose than you mean rolls and not roles.

Fixed. Eyes were glazing over with all the new threads.

[Brandon H]

In the event that we change the way voters are registered, which has come up already, for them to participate in the game, they will have to reregister. The big problem would be if someone shows up to vote and hasn't reregistered. So we will have to make sure everyone person is aware of that if it happens. We'll have to make sure we PM every person in Atlasia.

[President Marokai]

I certainly hope we reboot the voter rolls, we need to kill off some of the dead voters and whatever Constitution we do implement, needs to deal with zombies as well.

[Smid]

One thing we could consider is making registrations last for 12 months. You could then have an up-to-date voter roll in the wiki that details all members, their state of registration (and/or electorate, if we go down a universal membership route) and also the date their registration expires. This would make it easy for an active member to see when their registration is due to expire so they can renew. Re-registration will take a whole minute or so at most each year, which won't pose a problem for active members, while purging inactive members from the roll.

An alternative would be all registrations expire on a particular date, which makes it easier to keep track of when someone needs to re-register, but would create an administrative nightmare. If we look at an annual re-registration system, we're probably better off going with the first of the two options.

That's not to say that we should or shouldn't require annual registration, it's just a suggestion for discussion.

[Senator Ben]

Smid's first idea is probably a good way to purge the voter rolls of inactive voters.  For regulars, it won't be a problem, and it will get rid of people no longer involved in Atlasia.

[President Marokai]

Certainly not a terrible idea, I like it. Though we should have more things than just annual voter registration to deal with inactive people. Perhaps depending on what proposal(s) we start to draft we can implement things such as, for instance, if we implement a parliamentary system that involved a lower house comprised of all the citizens, we could strike those from the rolls if they don't vote in a certain number of consecutive legislative sessions.

[Smid]

Certainly not a terrible idea, I like it. Though we should have more things than just annual voter registration to deal with inactive people. Perhaps depending on what proposal(s) we start to draft we can implement things such as, for instance, if we implement a parliamentary system that involved a lower house comprised of all the citizens, we could strike those from the rolls if they don't vote in a certain number of consecutive legislative sessions.

An excellent idea.

It reminds me a little of an argument used over here in relation to compulsory voting. As most would know, there is compulsory participation in Australian elections. One of the arguments in favour of compulsory voting is that voting is a right, true, but it is also a responsibility - that rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin.

If we provide everyone the opportunity to participate - such as through a universal model, then people have the right to participate but there should be a minimum participation requirement to ensure that people fulfil their responsibility to participate also. If someone is not prepared to carry out their duty/responsibility to take part, then there's a good argument for removing their ability to participate in elections.

[Purple State]

And to ensure that there isn't a flood of registrations after the new Constitution is put in place, perhaps stratify the expiration dates for current members every 3 months so that 1/4 of the citizens are registering rather than all of them.