The Take Me To Your Leader Amendment

[Dame Litz Cjantscheir, UrN]

The Take Me To Your Leader Amendment

WHEREAS currently under the Organic Law, the first person to submit the Party Registration and the fee may name him/herself as leader,

WHEREAS a Party Leader assigns his/her parties Cosa and provincial seats and is the official representation of his/her party

WHEREAS a dishonest person can abuse this method to hijack his own or rival party and legally make himself leader,

WHEREAS thankfully this has not occurred in the Kingdom yet

WHEREAS to prevent such abuse, we need to have a mechanism in place which prevents such taking place

WHEREAS there is currently no such mechanism in the Organic Law

THEREFORE, the Ziu hereby approves the following amendment to the Organic Law, and submits them to the people of the Kingdom of Talossa for ratification, and upon said ratification requests that His Majesty the King do promulgate the same:

Article VI: Political Parties, of the Organic Law is hereby amended to read as follows:


Section 2: In order to assume their seats in the Cosa, political parties must be registered. A party may register at any time by submitting to the Secretary of State the following; The name of their party leader, a 50 word (or less) statement of the general aims and views of the party and the registration fee, which is set by law and uniform to all parties.

Section 3: Each party shall have only one party leader, at any given time, and may only submit one registration form to the Secretary of State, any party who submits more than one registration or submits more than one person to be designated as party leader shall not be registered, until the party membership, communicating with the Secretary of State confirms the name of the sole party leader and/or the correct registration form. Parties may change their leader at any time, by publicly submitting to the Secretary of State, a statement with the name of the new party leader. The Secretary of State shall refuse to change the Leadership of the party, if within 5 days of receiving a statement to change the Party Leader, he receives a petition from 1/3rd of the party membership asking him to refuse such a statement. In such case, The Secretary of State shall endeavour to resolve who is the correct party leader by communicating with the Party Membership.

Section 4: All parties will be deemed unregistered once the Cosa has been dissolved by a Writ of Dissolution, parties must re-register in order to assume their seats in the next Cosa session. Any party which wins seats in a General Election but does not register by the deadline of the first Clark, shall irrevocably forfeit all their seats and the King shall appoint person(s) to these seats according to his own best judgement.

Uréu q'estadra sa,

Litz Cjantscheir (Seneschal, MC, RUMP)

[Istefan Lorentzescu]

I like the gist of this, but their is no way to accurately Know the membership of a Talossan political party so the SOS has no way of calculating 1/3rd of the party membership.

[Hooligan]

Yes, that is the one part of the bill that needs to be puzzled over, and is why the Seneschal has decided to bring the draft here to the Hopper. Can anyone come up with some proper way for to help the Secretary of State out in situations like this? We are hoping that debate and discussion here will turn something up.

Hool

[Istefan Lorentzescu]

We could look at formalizing party membership or use the stated party membership of the previous cosa but that would cause problems with creating new parties.

Maybe "reregistration" of parties from the previous cosa could only be made using the previous cosa party membership. But this could not stop someone creating a party with a new name.

ie. only immediate past cosa members of the RUMP could "reregister" using that name.

sorry still a bit rough

[Hooligan]

Yes, it does seem that since the only way in which a person is officially associated with a party (other than by being the registered party leader) is to be given seats in the Cosa by a party, this idea may be the best we can come up with for ensuring that the party registration is backed by the party itself.

So, perhaps, any re-registration of an existing party that includes a change in the party leader must be accompanied, when filed with the Secretary of State, by the endorsement of members of the Cosa who hold or held (in the current or most recently completed Cosa) a majority of the seats that were distributed by that party.

As you say, this doesn't 100% assist with registering new parties, but we can perhaps handle that in a different way (if we can come up with one).

Thoughts?

Hool

[Istefan Lorentzescu]

maybe we need only expressly state that new parties require no such endorsement

[Martì Prevuost]

Jul 24, 2011 10:17:48 GMT -6 Hooligan said:

Yes, it does seem that since the only way in which a person is officially associated with a party (other than by being the registered party leader) is to be given seats in the Cosa by a party, this idea may be the best we can come up with for ensuring that the party registration is backed by the party itself.

I disagree. I announced my intention to join the RUMP based on the Party Platform, among other reasons, and was granted access to the Über-Secret RUMP Group (so secret, in fact, that I have to use a German word to describe how secret it is) well in advance of the party leader's gracious assignment of vacant seats to my anxiously awaiting cheeks.

So was my acceptance merely symbolic? I think not. It was my intention to associate myself to the party and to vote for the party during the next general election, thereby assisting in ensuring a RUMP PM, etc.

Was I mistaken? Have I been mislead?
Tell me it ain't so.

MAG

[Istefan Lorentzescu]

MAG

Currently their are no public/official lists of members of political parties that would be available for the SOS to use to calculate from.

[Hooligan]

Mag,

Anyone can claim to be a member of any party, but the only thing we have that can be used to prove one's party membership to a royal or government official is either one's most recent vote in a general election (which really shouldn't be relied upon, since the wind may have blown since then), or the fact that a party has given Cosa seats to a person. So when it comes to helping the Secretary of State decide which (if he has multiple) party registration form he receives is the real deal and which other(s) are fraudulent, it does seem like people in your (earlier) pre-Cosa-seat-assignment, pre-election-participation condition cannot properly be someone that the Secretary can rely on.

Hool

[Istefan Lorentzescu]

Well i know myself for complicated reasons I wont go into hear, that I was a member of the now defunct FGP and voted for the PPT. So that vote in a previous general election is not always mean membership of that party.

Supporting a party doesn't mean your necessarily a member.

[Martì Prevuost]

So although I asked to join the RUMP - and went through that horrid and traumatic initiation (let's be honest - hazing), I was a RUMPINO (RUMP in name only).

So sad.

Oh well - at least my cheeks now have seats!!!
MAG

[Hooligan]

Well, I would call you a full fledged RUMPer from the get go, as I'm sure any party leader would of anyone who joins their party, but when it comes to who we can tell the SecState to actually trust when he has to figure out something about a party registration list, I think that it can only be people who hold that party's seats. Even Senators are out, so don't feel bad for the new members.

Hool

[Ián Tamorán S.H.]

As a mere mathematician, I am slightly puzzled.

Suppose there is a party of, say, one hundred members.
The party holds an internal vote to choose its leader.
Candidate A gets 66 votes, and candidate B gets 34 votes.
So Candidate A is nominated as the leader...
BUT immediately the 34 voters for B (more than a third of the party) object - and the majority's choice is prevented from leading...

... or am I missing something?

[Ián Tamorán S.H.]

... and is there anything that prevents an individual from claiming to be a member of more than one party at the same time?

Again, I ask out of ignorance.

[Hooligan]

Yes, I thought of that same issue, and for this reason, I think that "one third" must needs-be be raised to "one-half".

Hool