Census Bureau of Atlasia: Homelycooking, Registrar General

[Queen Mum Inks.LWC]

I meant registrar general. Sorry, I'm pretty pissed at the moment that this lawsuit was ever brought.

So instead of directing your RG to follow what the Constitution says, you're pissed at me for bringing a lawsuit to force actual enforcement of the Constitution?  I don't like that homely resigned either, but the blame for this is in no way on me.  I gave homely ample time to change his stance on this.  He's your RG; you could've directed him to take different action.

[Queen Mum Inks.LWC]

I meant registrar general. Sorry, I'm pretty pissed at the moment that this lawsuit was ever brought.

So instead of directing your RG to follow what the Constitution says, you're pissed at me for bringing a lawsuit to force actual enforcement of the Constitution?  I don't like that homely resigned either, but the blame for this is in no way on me.  I gave homely ample time to change his stance on this.  He's your RG; you could've directed him to take different action.

Would have PM'ing all the people who were deregistered have taken more time than writing up a whole case? Maybe you and Shua could have split the workload.

It's not about how much time it would've taken.  It's about enforcing the Constitution as it's actually written.  But if this habbit were to continue every election, yes, it probably would've taken more time than the 20 minutes or so that it took to write the case.

[Queen Mum Inks.LWC]

Totally behind the President on this one. This nonsense is nonsense. Homely was doing a great job. Lawsuits like that are only a detriment to the game itself and does not advance the game at all. Next time someone sees a problem he or she should propose a solution rather than a lawsuit.

I did propose a solution... that homely interpret the law as written--all of the law.  It's pretty hard to reach the conclusion he did using normal English language, because "The said voter" quite clearly can't mean "any registered voter".

I agree that homely was doing a great job; it's why I advocated for him to stay.  But leaving was his choice; it wasn't one of my requests for relief in the lawsuit.  The decision was entirely up to homely, and no offense, but it's homely and the administration who bear 100% of the blame here.

[Queen Mum Inks.LWC]

I plan to offer an amendment as soon as I can that cleans up the wording so we will know for sure what it means to deregister someone. Right now, fighting to keep these inactive voters on the rolls is unproductive regardless of whether the decision was right, which it was. If you've missed two elections, chances are you don't want to continue voting, and registering again isn't difficult at all if you decide you want to come back. Just look at Cinci, Happywarrior, Rowan, etc...

Then introduce an amendment to change it to two elections.  I just think we should enforce the laws as written.

If the case were purely a syntactic dispute, Inks, then I think I might have looked rather silly in defending my actions as RG. However, the Supreme Court did acknowledge that the relevant portion of the Constitution "suffers from ambiguous language and hamfisted writing" but didn't do much to resolve any of those ambiguities in a way that provides the RG with clear interpretational guidelines.

No offense, but your argument was not at all convincing.  I've never seen someone interpret "the" to mean "any".  Why on earth would the drafters put in clause 1 if it wasn't intended to be read in conjunction with clause 2?

[Queen Mum Inks.LWC]

The bottom line as I understand it is that basically the Court agreed with what Fritz was saying, right? Basically, that six months and three federal elections equal the same amount of time. The problem is, the text doesn't say that, and as this case demonstrates, the two need not equal each other. Why would the text say the same thing back-to-back in two different ways anyway? I mean, if that's the situation, the decision inserts something into the text that really isn't there. I never read the two sentences that way.

No; as I pointed out there is the December election issue.  That is the one time that the 3 election rule could have a bearing on whether someone who missed 6 months will be deregistered.

[Queen Mum Inks.LWC]

If the case were purely a syntactic dispute, Inks, then I think I might have looked rather silly in defending my actions as RG. However, the Supreme Court did acknowledge that the relevant portion of the Constitution "suffers from ambiguous language and hamfisted writing" but didn't do much to resolve any of those ambiguities in a way that provides the RG with clear interpretational guidelines.

No offense, but your argument was not at all convincing.  I've never seen someone interpret "the" to mean "any".  Why on earth would the drafters put in clause 1 if it wasn't intended to be read in conjunction with clause 2?

Oh, I don't disagree. It really wasn't possible to twist the "the said voter" clause to my advantage. My argument had to rely on my conviction that the "six months" standard was not enforceable. The court disagreed, evidently.

Lack of enforceability doesn't mean you can ignore it though.  And I don't see how it's not enforceable.  Look - I don't want to get into a fight over this, but I think it's unfair that I'm getting criticized over this.  I told you to stay on.  It was 100% your choice to ignore the law (which you now admit you did because it was "not enforceable", and it was 100% your choice to resign.