Talk Elections

This is not a new idea; I believe The People ran a poll about it sometime last year.  But I think it is  an idea that would make playing at the regional level much funner.  We simply do not have enough active participants for both federal and regional races to be competitive.  We've seen how uncompetitive the senate races have gotten, while in many regions we have to scramble to fill that last legislative seat.  By reducing the number of regions, the individual regions will have more people, and thus more competition.  I know that the main reason a lot of us play is for the exciting elections.  This should go a long way towards fixing that problem.

I also have to say I like the way the borders look, especially in this proposal.  I always thought the five region map was ugly.

()

NO

For the love of God, not this again.

Haven't we given up enough for the sake of "competitiveness"?

Yes, though not with those borders. That Northern region would still have more than double the West's population.

BOO *throws cabbage*

Yes, but different borders.

Yes, but give AZ & NM to IDS.

Yes - if we keep the ME and the IDS as separate regions and merge the NE with the MW and the Pacific. :P

And annex Canada.
NE would recieve New Brunswick, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador and Southeast Ontario.
Pacific would recieve Northwest Ontario, Manitoba, Nunavut, Saskatchewan, Northwest Territories, Alberta, British Columbia and Yukon.

Ugh, 6 years later and this debate is still around.

NO

I'd have to say no. I dont want Indiana put with the New England states (Indiana would be a better fit wth the IDS). This dilutes conservative chances of gaining a stronger foothold in Atlasian politics.

Another idea might be the return of districts instead of at-large Senate seats, although I'm sure there's good reason we got rid of them in the first place. :P

Am I the only person here who remembers when we got rid of them? Bringing back districts would be an awful idea.

I remember when we got rid of them. Personally, I always thought it was an awful idea getting rid of the district seats.. but that's me.

Damn, I didn't expect it to be popular, but I also didn't expect such a visceral reaction.

It was driven largely by the fact that district seats almost always resembled regional seats, IIRC.  I have no idea how abolishing at-large seats would help this.  If district seats were brought back, it would make much more sense for them to replace regional seats than at-large seats.

There's always a vocal contingent of people who will vigorously oppose any change. Oddly, that group is generally composed of people who haven't been around very long.

I'm not saying it's perfect, but the Northeast has obviously had more competitive elections than any of the other regions. This is quite clearly because it has double the population of the other regions.

It's not a huge deal to me, really. But I haven't heard any good arguments against my reasoning.

It's also fairly ideologically diverse. The proposals in reducing the regions have almost always just combined the Midwest with the Pacific and the Mideast with the South. This solves almost nothing, and even for the sake of argument you were proposing merging the Mideast and Midwest and South with the Pacific, people would hate the idea, because those in the Mideast, especially, love having complete control over the region.

It would also necessitate a return to districts to continue electing the same number of Senators, which I just plainly don't see the point of.

I'm not opposed to change, but I don't like proposals that make big changes like this in trying to force people to be more competitive, which is different than the proposals I bring forward, which are more focused on encouraging certain practices or are improvements related to the governing side of the game. You can't force general competition or activity like this. That sort of stuff comes and goes on its own.

But if competitive elections are the issue, you'd just end up with a massive conservative bloc and a massive liberal bloc with the Northeast as the only really varied region.

Perhaps a re-jigging of the boundaries of the 4 other regions is in order?

Idk. The Pacific and Midwest are both leftist, but they've usually been different kinds of leftist.

Why don't we combine the Pacific with the IDS and the ME with the Midwest.  A Heartland Region and an Outer Rim region.  Whaddaya think?

I think you guys are also failing to see that it's because the regions are so small that they can become so dominated by one faction.

The solution, then, is to encourage migration, like we did in 2005.

I kind of just wish people registered where they actually lived. And foreigners stayed in the same spot. That would probably fix a lot of things.

I seem to recall that a lot of the 2005 effort was to get foreigners to register in underpopulated regions; that's how the Midwest got its sizable German contingent, for example.