Party Development

[bgwah]

Perhaps we need some guidelines for creating new parties. Something like requiring at least five people signing up within a week of the party's creation for it to officially exist as an Atlasian party. If it fails to find five people within that time frame, it will not become a party. If an official party drops under 5 candidates, then it will cease to exist (and its members shall automatically become independents until they join another official party) within 30 days unless it can get back to 5.

Likewise, perhaps we should actually give some benefit to being an official major party... A major party automatically gets its candidates on the ballot. People would still be able to run as an independent, but would be required to get a number of signatures (say 3 for a regional office, 5 or more for a national office). This is usually how it works in the real world.

A party should only be able to run one candidate for an office (and up to five for the nationwide Senate election). We would have to figure out how primaries would work when there's more than one candidate.

Perhaps we could follow New York's example and have fusion voting--a candidate could run with the endorsement of multiple parties.