Post by Glüc da Dhi on Jul 25, 2017 15:58:57 GMT -6
Fellow Cézembreans, we need to have a discussion about our electoral system. Essentially, other than for Sénéchal elections, it's non existent, and if we want to be taken seriously as a province, maybe we should change that. (Or maybe not. That is a valid view as well, but I think we should at least discuss it.)
Inxheneu Crova Txosuè Éiric Rôibeardescù Ián Tamorán S.H. Ián B. Anglatzarâ Ian da Bitour Martì Vataldestreça Alèx Soleighlfred Owen Edwards Dame Litz Cjantscheir, UrN Moritz Fernaodescu Sir X. Pol Briga Sir C. M. Siervicül
Some thoughts:
I'm not neccesarily unhappy about the current system for electing a Sénéchal, though I do feel it has not been used and tested enough. I think the main two problems with ballotbin are that the admin can see who voted at any time and at the end the ballots are presented in order, so if you want to with a good memory and a bit of puzzling you can figure out who voted what. Of course if you log only at the start and end and even if you log in once or twice during the election you won't know, but we have to trust the admin to do that. The other problem is that in the past the site has been a bit unreliable, no longer allowing new accounts and being poorly updated and such. However it seems the site has been recently updated and is working again. There are alternatives to ballotbin, but most of these have even bigger problems, allowing the admin to see even more, or the email adresses to which the ballot was sent not being traceable (which conflicts with the current law and might allow an admin to just send a bunch of emails to himself), or it costs money. For now I think ballotbin is the best we have, but does anyone know an even better alternative?
The law itself (A8, can be found in the administration guide) probably is still a bit clumsy, so might require some more tweaking. One additional problem (and we have never really figured this out, because nobody ever applied as a candidate representative) is that maybe mpf will allow only one person access to the database, because thats how the database works. (Of course that person could share with the representatives if authorised, but it's still somewhat inconvenient.) Maybe it would be best if we just had our own database. Maybe we could just have the conducting officer update a provincial database of email adresses before each election. I'm not 100% of the legal side of things here.
With regards to Senatorial elections there's of course another alternative, which is let the chancery conduct our elections. However, this would then not be according to the rules we want as a province. It also further reduces the importance of our province and the provincial legislature, since they don't make the rules anymore. If we want to be active and independent as a province I believe we should conduct our own elections. (Also senatorial elections conducted by the chancery have had their own problems in recent years.) So I do believe we should conduct our own senatorial elections, using roughly the same rules as for senechal elections.
For elections to l'etats this might be even more urgent considering the poor state of provincial elections conducted at the national level. It might not be feasible to sort this out before the next election though. I have also some additional thoughts about a major reform of l'etats, which I will post in another thread soon.
Anyway, all of this brings us with another problem. We can have all these in sequence, but then wed also need to appoint three conducting officers, and each time they would have to ask mpf to change who has access to the database. That would be a mess. Plus, it would probably be horrible for turnout to have essentially four different elections with a different ballot through different mails in two months. A much more logical solution would be to do it all at once, but then we'd have to find a conducting officer who is both active and not interested in becoming a senator or sénéchal or a member of l'etats. Someone like that might not always be present in Cézembre. What might be even better is to have our own provincial SoS, considering the rather weird system where the Sénéchal has to appoint whoever conducts the election of his succesor and possibly her/his re-election, but at least we should have one person doing this per election cycle. To me the obvious solution would be to explicitly allow this person to be a Talossan who isn't a Cézembrean. There are always active Talossans and if you're not a Cézembrean you can't be a candidate for any of these offices anyway. This person would still conduct the elections using the rules we set as a province. (One option might be to always have the Governor-General conduct the elections, not sure how Sir Cresti would feel about that.)
I urge all active Cézembreans to share their thoughts on this.
We won't be able to sort all this out before the upcoming elections, but in the meantime, I have proposed a temporary bill to conduct our own Senatorial elections this time. I conduct these myself if people are ok with that. I'm not planning on running for Lord Warden and I have conducted Sénéchal elections before, but I can also appoint someone more neutral if people want this. Please have a look at that one as well. Only members of l'etats can vote on it, but there aren't many active MolEs at the moment so discussion will probably have to come from elsewhere. If it fails, I will ask the chancery to conduct our elections once more.
Inxheneu Crova Txosuè Éiric Rôibeardescù Ián Tamorán S.H. Ián B. Anglatzarâ Ian da Bitour Martì Vataldestreça Alèx Soleighlfred Owen Edwards Dame Litz Cjantscheir, UrN Moritz Fernaodescu Sir X. Pol Briga Sir C. M. Siervicül
Some thoughts:
I'm not neccesarily unhappy about the current system for electing a Sénéchal, though I do feel it has not been used and tested enough. I think the main two problems with ballotbin are that the admin can see who voted at any time and at the end the ballots are presented in order, so if you want to with a good memory and a bit of puzzling you can figure out who voted what. Of course if you log only at the start and end and even if you log in once or twice during the election you won't know, but we have to trust the admin to do that. The other problem is that in the past the site has been a bit unreliable, no longer allowing new accounts and being poorly updated and such. However it seems the site has been recently updated and is working again. There are alternatives to ballotbin, but most of these have even bigger problems, allowing the admin to see even more, or the email adresses to which the ballot was sent not being traceable (which conflicts with the current law and might allow an admin to just send a bunch of emails to himself), or it costs money. For now I think ballotbin is the best we have, but does anyone know an even better alternative?
The law itself (A8, can be found in the administration guide) probably is still a bit clumsy, so might require some more tweaking. One additional problem (and we have never really figured this out, because nobody ever applied as a candidate representative) is that maybe mpf will allow only one person access to the database, because thats how the database works. (Of course that person could share with the representatives if authorised, but it's still somewhat inconvenient.) Maybe it would be best if we just had our own database. Maybe we could just have the conducting officer update a provincial database of email adresses before each election. I'm not 100% of the legal side of things here.
With regards to Senatorial elections there's of course another alternative, which is let the chancery conduct our elections. However, this would then not be according to the rules we want as a province. It also further reduces the importance of our province and the provincial legislature, since they don't make the rules anymore. If we want to be active and independent as a province I believe we should conduct our own elections. (Also senatorial elections conducted by the chancery have had their own problems in recent years.) So I do believe we should conduct our own senatorial elections, using roughly the same rules as for senechal elections.
For elections to l'etats this might be even more urgent considering the poor state of provincial elections conducted at the national level. It might not be feasible to sort this out before the next election though. I have also some additional thoughts about a major reform of l'etats, which I will post in another thread soon.
Anyway, all of this brings us with another problem. We can have all these in sequence, but then wed also need to appoint three conducting officers, and each time they would have to ask mpf to change who has access to the database. That would be a mess. Plus, it would probably be horrible for turnout to have essentially four different elections with a different ballot through different mails in two months. A much more logical solution would be to do it all at once, but then we'd have to find a conducting officer who is both active and not interested in becoming a senator or sénéchal or a member of l'etats. Someone like that might not always be present in Cézembre. What might be even better is to have our own provincial SoS, considering the rather weird system where the Sénéchal has to appoint whoever conducts the election of his succesor and possibly her/his re-election, but at least we should have one person doing this per election cycle. To me the obvious solution would be to explicitly allow this person to be a Talossan who isn't a Cézembrean. There are always active Talossans and if you're not a Cézembrean you can't be a candidate for any of these offices anyway. This person would still conduct the elections using the rules we set as a province. (One option might be to always have the Governor-General conduct the elections, not sure how Sir Cresti would feel about that.)
I urge all active Cézembreans to share their thoughts on this.
We won't be able to sort all this out before the upcoming elections, but in the meantime, I have proposed a temporary bill to conduct our own Senatorial elections this time. I conduct these myself if people are ok with that. I'm not planning on running for Lord Warden and I have conducted Sénéchal elections before, but I can also appoint someone more neutral if people want this. Please have a look at that one as well. Only members of l'etats can vote on it, but there aren't many active MolEs at the moment so discussion will probably have to come from elsewhere. If it fails, I will ask the chancery to conduct our elections once more.
