Statement by the Republican

[Colonel Mximo Carbonèl]

Azul,

The Republican party is not anymore a one party man.
Thanks to the people who vote for us. This election make my day.
Seats are currently open to anybody who wish to joins the 50 Cosa of the Talossa history.

The Republican find the creation of a new party very strange.
We are waiting to see the Electoral committee decision on the matter.
We will push a bill to force party to pay the fee before the start of a new election.
We think the elector intention was to vote blank and not to give 2 seats to somebody else quick enough to pay 10 dollars.

The Republican cannot support any pro-monarchy coallition so we will sit in the opposition.
We hope the MRPT will make a deal with the FreeDem this time.
However, The Republican have a tradition to vote Yes on the first clark and we will continue to do so.
This tradition is to assure the people a stable governement in this era of minority governement.

The Republican of Florencia will support a MRPT Governor name by the Nimlet.

So now , we ask this governement to open a real convention in order to reform our constitution.
The Republican ask for a President elected for a term of 2 years and the end of the monarchy.
The fight just begin for a real democracy by the people and for the people.


Long live Talossa.

Mximo Carbonèl
Leader of the Republican
MC

[Vit Caçeir]

Dec 2, 2016 1:09:33 GMT -6 Colonel Mximo Carbonèl said:

The Republican find the creation of a new party very strange.
We are waiting to see the Electoral committee decision on the matter.
We will push a bill to force party to pay the fee before the start of a new election.
We think the elector intention was to vote blank and not to give 2 seats to somebody else quick enough to pay 10 dollars.

You might be quite interested to learn that we share common ground on this!

Dec 1, 2016 21:48:52 GMT -6 Vit Caçeir said:

1) To initiate a conversation to legally clarify how ballots for unregistered parties are counted, IEVAAPP will probably suggest a bill or something to close the technical loophole that has allowed Dear Leader Vitxalmour Éovart Caçeir to exploit the political freedom of a conscientious objector.

The problem is that standing procedure allows this to be done-- a similar thing occurred when the LRT dissolved itself at the end of the 38th Cosa: the party still received a vote in the 39th Cosa election, and was registered after the fact. These ballots aren't recorded as write-in, present, or even voided; they create a party-in-limbo which legally can be registered. And it has been registered.

I agree with what I'm pretty sure you're suggesting, which is that only ballots cast for parties registered before the election should be considered valid-- but an argument can be made that such "protest votes" ought to be counted along with the present votes, or perhaps in an entirely separate category. In either case, it's a discussion for the Hopper-- here's to hoping we'll be able to co-sponsor a bill in the first Clark!

[Colonel Mximo Carbonèl]

I think we should wait for the Electoral committee decision.
Or maybe I could give you a job in the Republican so we can merge... ;-)

Mximo

[Istefan Perþonest]

There's actually an very old precedent, in a pre-Internet-era Talossan election, where a Mickey Mouse Party was registered in order to capture votes cast for "Mickey Mouse" as a protest.

Of course, there's also an ambiguity in the laws (at least as they were when I last looked at them); it is (or at least used to be) not actually established anywhere in the law that the person registering the party with the SoS or paying the fee is necessarily the legitimate party leadership. (People were worried that someone could hijack, say, the RUMP by registering it first; I pointed out that the law didn't actually give control of a party to someone just because they registered it.) If the SoS (or maybe now the Electoral Commission; I haven't kept up on recent changes in the laws) were to decline to recognize Vit Caçeir as the bona fide leader of the IEVAAPP in favor of (say) whomever voted that way, well, it would be reasonable for the courts to uphold that. Complete with nobody ever learning who voted that way if he refused to surrender the privilege of the secret ballot.

And, hmm. Depending on how the law is written to implement the new amendment to the Organic Law on party lists, it may become impossible to do this in the future, as a party with no pre-election list possibly would not be able to fill any seats it was allocated by post-vote registering.

[Ián B. Anglatzarâ]

Dec 2, 2016 2:59:14 GMT -6 Istefan Perþonest said:

And, hmm. Depending on how the law is written to implement the new amendment to the Organic Law on party lists, it may become impossible to do this in the future, as a party with no pre-election list possibly would not be able to fill any seats it was allocated by post-vote registering.

One of the intended benefits of that amendment.

[Vit Caçeir]

That's actually the part of this that prompted my interest. I'm admittedly not familiar with the ins-and-outs of the DB, but in the election chat conversation it sounded like secret ballots are TRULY, wholly secret; it sounds like there's no known way to trace a ballot to a secret voter, therefore anyone who cast a secret ballot could claim to have cast the vote without any means of validation.

It's a problem that needs fixing. A thus far inconsequential problem and assuredly a problem that I've helped create, but in my own extremely limited Talossan experience I've seen this sort of recording of an unregistered party entity scenario pop up twice and election law's one of my quirks so I reckon fixing the clock I broke might be something fun to do.

However, if the thus far anonymous instigator happens to be reading this, and IEVAAPP does wind up with seats in the Cosa, rest assured that I will carry the torch you lit with honor, humility, and integrity and will explicitly vote against anything and everything that crosses my desk.

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Dec 2, 2016 1:30:14 GMT -6 Vit Caçeir said:

The problem is that standing procedure allows this to be done-- a similar thing occurred when the LRT dissolved itself at the end of the 38th Cosa: the party still received a vote in the 39th Cosa election, and was registered after the fact.

At least in that case, however, the party was registered by someone who had voted for it. Didn't you vote MRPT?

Dec 2, 2016 2:59:14 GMT -6 Istefan Perþonest said:

There's actually an very old precedent, in a pre-Internet-era Talossan election, where a Mickey Mouse Party was registered in order to capture votes cast for "Mickey Mouse" as a protest.

A more recent (and less amusing) example is when Rischa Caveir cast a protest vote for "NONE" in the 33rd Cosa election, and Ben swooped in and registered the NONE Party. That was one of the events leading to the creation of the Republic. I can't remember if there was a legal challenge to Ben's action--Marti-Pair Furxheir S.H., do you?

If this precedent stands, however, the big danger presented by such joke maneuvering is that any time between now and 1 January someone could register the "Present" Party, claiming 11 votes and 19 seats (and reducing the other parties' seat totals proportionally).

[Marti-Pair Furxheir S.H.]

Dec 2, 2016 2:59:14 GMT -6 Istefan Perþonest said:

If the SoS (or maybe now the Electoral Commission; I haven't kept up on recent changes in the laws) were to decline to recognize Vit Caçeir as the bona fide leader of the IEVAAPP in favor of (say) whomever voted that way, well, it would be reasonable for the courts to uphold that. Complete with nobody ever learning who voted that way if he refused to surrender the privilege of the secret ballot.

I cannot as the SoS refuse the registration, but the Electoral commission could decide to count the vote as PRESENT, and as a member of the future EC, I will argue as such. But it's the EC that has the final decision.

[Marti-Pair Furxheir S.H.]

Dec 2, 2016 4:44:00 GMT -6 Sir C. M. Siervicül said:

Ben swooped in and registered the NONE Party. That was one of the events leading to the creation of the Republic. I can't remember if there was a legal challenge to Ben's action--Marti-Pair Furxheir S.H. , do you?

During the election, Ben was harassing me for daring to ask verification of the votes and for having the NERVE to fire him as Deputy SoS, something that ALL of the party leaders had asked me to do.

In the middle of the election, the Republic of Talossa was formed, and Ben at some point registered the NONE party. I noted it down, but the harassment against me was just seriously overblown.

I was called a traitor for not taking back Wittenberg, since I was Wittenberg's hoster, but as I kept explaining, even if I was the hoster of Wittenberg, I was not the owner of Wittenberg.

Worse, I was in a pretty, pretty bad shape: talossa.proboards.com/thread/6/busy?page=1&scrollTo=34

I was actually building my inground pool at that moment!


I began working on an identical version for the Kingdom, but Ben was just going at me wildly, while most of my friends in the Republic were behind me.

In the mean time, someone created THIS Wittenberg, but Ben kept harassing me.

As for in the Kingdom, it was clear that the election was pretty much fucked up: talossa.proboards.com/thread/8/current-election

This is a summary of what was happening: talossa.proboards.com/thread/14/all-left?page=1&scrollTo=58

I eventually left for the Republic. By then, many of the seats of the Cosa were empty: a total of 67!!! As such, I don't think anyone cared about the NONE party. These were seats that COULD be filled, until the 67 for the GCP and PC party which would remain vacant.

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Dec 2, 2016 5:22:37 GMT -6 Marti-Pair Furxheir S.H. said:

I eventually left for the Republic. By then, many of the seats of the Cosa were empty: a total of 67!!! As such, I don't think anyone cared about the NONE party. These were seats that COULD be filled, until the 67 for the GCP and PC party which would remain vacant.

Right, that makes sense. Ben's action wasn't formally challenged because Rischa had renounced shortly after voting (soon to be followed by many others).

[Vit Caçeir]

Dec 2, 2016 4:44:00 GMT -6 Sir C. M. Siervicül said:

Dec 2, 2016 1:30:14 GMT -6 Vit Caçeir said:

The problem is that standing procedure allows this to be done-- a similar thing occurred when the LRT dissolved itself at the end of the 38th Cosa: the party still received a vote in the 39th Cosa election, and was registered after the fact.

At least in that case, however, the party was registered by someone who had voted for it. Didn't you vote MRPT?

Correct, though standing protocol doesn’t require the registrant to have cast their vote for the unregistered party—only that the entity created in through the record be retroactively registered as a political party. I wasn’t even aware that “Present” votes were also being counted as a registerable" entity.

It’s been correctly observed that Referendum 2 would correct joke maneuvering by virtue of circumstance but considering that it’s currently the subject of a legal dispute, I believe legislation designed to explicitly address the issue wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

The two solutions that seem most readily apparent would be to either dismiss all ballots for unregistered entities as spoiled, or to create a separate all-encompassing tally for present, blank, protest, etc. votes that would not be factored into seat assignment. Do you have an opinion on the issue?

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Dec 2, 2016 15:16:17 GMT -6 Vit Caçeir said:

I wasn’t even aware that “Present” votes were also being counted as a registerable" entity.

Well, neither was the IEVAAPP, until you registered it. There's really no category of things that are "being counted as registerable entities". There are just things that have been registered and things that have not (at least yet). Both "Present" and "IEVAAP" were in category 2 before (along with an infinite range of other possible alphanumeric sequences). Now one of them is in category 1. Why not the other?

Dec 2, 2016 15:16:17 GMT -6 Vit Caçeir said:

The two solutions that seem most readily apparent would be to either dismiss all ballots for unregistered entities as spoiled, or to create a separate all-encompassing tally for present, blank, protest, etc. votes that would not be factored into seat assignment. Do you have an opinion on the issue?

What do you see as the practical difference between those solutions? Another possibility is to still allow write-in parties, but require the voter to identify the party leader (e.g. "Tyler Perry's Madea Party").

[Istefan Perþonest]

Dec 2, 2016 5:05:25 GMT -6 Marti-Pair Furxheir S.H. said:

I cannot as the SoS refuse the registration,

Well, the OrgLaw says,

A party may register at any time with the Secretary of State as follows: First, the party must have at least one member designated as its "Leader."

The question I would ask, then, is Vit Caçeir a bona fide member of the party and its bona fide designated "Leader"? That he claims to be a member and leader is just that; a claim. Is it actually a fact, given the totality of the circumstances? If not, then the party has failed the first registration requirement.

Now, historical practice is in his favor on this issue, given the cases of Mickey Mouse, NONE, and LRT. And it may be that the SoS isn't allowed to judge this, it's a matter for the EC or the courts. And, of course, I am not a member of the Talossan Bar, so this is all layman's speculation. But I'm fairly sure a claim, on its own, is not proof of a fact.

[Vit Caçeir]

Dec 2, 2016 16:35:07 GMT -6 Sir C. M. Siervicül said:

Dec 2, 2016 15:16:17 GMT -6 Vit Caçeir said:

The two solutions that seem most readily apparent would be to either dismiss all ballots for unregistered entities as spoiled, or to create a separate all-encompassing tally for present, blank, protest, etc. votes that would not be factored into seat assignment. Do you have an opinion on the issue?

What do you see as the practical difference between those solutions? Another possibility is to still allow write-in parties, but require the voter to identify the party leader (e.g. "Tyler Perry's Madea Party").

As far as practical consequences are concerned, there's effectively no difference; the distinction between the two lies in whether a protest vote is valued as a part of the electoral process.

Personally I'm not big on the write-in party / retroactive registration setup-- it effectively allows a party to contest the election without weighing in as part in the electoral process and dialogue.

<<< Case in point.

Dec 2, 2016 19:24:33 GMT -6 Istefan Perþonest said:

Dec 2, 2016 5:05:25 GMT -6 Marti-Pair Furxheir S.H. said:

I cannot as the SoS refuse the registration,

Well, the OrgLaw says,

A party may register at any time with the Secretary of State as follows: First, the party must have at least one member designated as its "Leader."

The question I would ask, then, is Vit Caçeir a bona fide member of the party and its bona fide designated "Leader"? That he claims to be a member and leader is just that; a claim. Is it actually a fact, given the totality of the circumstances? If not, then the party has failed the first registration requirement.

Claim: not only am I a bona fide member, I'm also the bona fide Chairman, the bona fide Finance Director, the bona fide Executive Director, and the bona fide Operations Director!

Assertion: the written guidelines on what constitutes bona fide party membership in Talossan politics might be a helpful resource when the time comes for the EC to consider this issue.

[Munditenens Tresplet]

Dec 3, 2016 14:48:18 GMT -6 Vit Caçeir said:

Assertion: the written guidelines on what constitutes bona fide party membership in Talossan politics might be a helpful resource when the time comes for the EC to consider this issue.

That would be serious meddling in a party's internal affairs, which would be inOrganic.