Contitution Article: Poll Scheme

[Pedrunn]

Comments to the Article: Polling.
1)

(c) Non-Citizens are not allowed to vote in any poll except Unofficial ones.
(d) When it is known that non-Citizens have voted in a poll and it is also known what they have voted, this poll is valid if the votes by non-Citizens are removed from the final result.
(e) When the things in 2(d) are not known but there is a reasonable suspicion that non-Citizens have voted in a poll, the Court may declare this poll invalid.

When I wrote that in Amendments and laws (lawsuit actually) must have a validation post from the voters was to prevent votes from non-citizen were valid since those are too delicate issues that change all the game course.
But a similar procedure for the Official polls and ellection was not implemented. Why? Because many voters dont want to bother to write posts. So how can we control the non-citzens? Unfortunetly we cant . Thats why i dont think we should make a brazilian-like constitution wich many laws exist but arent in use. therefore comes the phrase: "It is forbidden but you can". So i am in favor of a tolerance for the votes of non-citizens for the ellection and official poll.
Dont see much choice here. We just have to have this tolerance.

2)
Semanthics: Law are the best name for the poll type number III?
Laws are something static, something that is to be written in a constitution.
When this poll type should be an intervention from the citizens in the government. Something circustancial, temporary. Wich i dont think the name Law gives a picture of it.
I dont know if "lawsuit" is the best name for it too. but i really dont think "Law" is. Anyone has a suggestion or comment? after all i am brazilian and my english is limited.

I guess those two small things are all i have found. The rest is terrific

BTW:

Article VI: Impeachment

Do we really need a whole article for this?
We can just consider the Impeachment process an Law (or whatever we call) poll. After all these types of poll exist for this mean. Give the citzen the power to do whatever they want if most of the community wants too.

[Locutus]

Re: 1)

You don't have to explain tolerance to me: I'm Dutch, we invented tolerance

But yes, you can't stop non-Citizens from voting unless you do everything by PM or posting. The problems with that are (1) that it's less anonymous and with that less democratic (peer pressure can force you to vote a certain way if voting is not anonymous) and (2) that it will mean people have to do more to vote and this will discourage people from voting.
And if you consider that the only difference between Citizens and non-Citizens is a single post in the Citizen Registry (and noone can prevent someone from becoming a Citizen), it's really rather silly to resist non-Citizen voting. I think the legal framework for doing so should be there (so that we can stop if it's needed), but under normal circumstances I see no need to use it much. Your 'confirmed voting' system is IMHO already taking it a bit far, but I'll go along with it if others will.


Re: 2)

Laws are indeed a correct term for it, I can name dozens of Dutch laws which are very 'ad-hoc' and only apply to specific situations, this is actually quite normal, at least here in the Netherlands. But I know what you mean, and that's why I suggested the alternative 'Resolution'. As far as I, as a judicial layman, can tell it's pretty much the same thing as a Law but it sounds less 'static'. (Think RL UN Resolutions: some are simply condemnations of Israeli/Palestinian attacks, others lay down fundamental principles of UN policy (e.g. the resolution on how to deal with "Children and armed conflict").)

I guess those two small things are all i have found. The rest is terrific

That's good to hear


Re: Impeachment.

Impeachment is serious thing, and although I doubt will need it often (if ever), it shouldn't be dealt with lightly. I think that impeachment should only be possible after review by the Court, so we may need to lay down some groundrules for that. How big a majority is needed to impeach someone? That needs to be established. Also, what happens after someone is impeached? Who replaces him? The President? The Court? The people, through elections? Of course, elections are inevitable, but should they take place as soon as someone is impeached or should a temp replace the impeached official until the next elections? If elections are held immediately, they will take a few days. Who will do the job in the meantime? Etc, etc, there's a bunch of things that need to be established in advance, just like with elections. It doesn't have to be 3 pages of legal text, but a proper procedure needs to be there when (if?) we need it, IMHO.
For now I'm assuming we'll have a seperate Constitution article on that but if it turns out to be very short, we can also place it under the article that deals with the Court, the Ministers or some other one...

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Pedrunn
Your Bill of Rights is a improvement over the ACDG one. Still i want to point some stuff.

Excellent stuff I agree with your new proposal, it much simpler yet still contains the same rights. However, I do have the followinging comments:

Section 9 will be impossible to fiscalize.

1) Fiscalize? Is that even a word? It's not in my dictionary.... (Webster)
So I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

the line "or make any irreversible changes to any of the saved games" is impossible to do unless if hacking the president PC to get the official saved game.

2) An example of making irreversible changes it to switch government (so effectively to switch to Anarchy): you don't play ahead (as you don't end the turn), but you do change the game irreversibly, as you can't cancel a revolution once it's started. Same with diplomacy: diplomatic agreements change the AI state without requiring you to end the turn. People might do this to see how it affects the game and use this knowledge to vote a certain way in polls. This should not be allowed.
Other things, like adding specialists or changing war state, are reversible within the same gameturn without having an affect on the gamestate. IMHO this should be (and in other DGs is) allowed, so you don't have to rely entirely on textfiles and reference charts and stuff when determining what to vote for...

3) I would like to rephrase your section 3 to make it clearer and less ambiguous gramatically (and with that senmantically as well), to prevent problems with legal interpretation (however unlikely).

So I endorse your proposal but with the following changes (section 3 and the last sentence of section 5 are different):

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Article: Bill of Rights

1. Any person who has registered to participate in this Democracy Game in the Citizen Registry is considered a Citizen. No person shall be denied the right to become a Citizen.

2. No Citizen shall ever be denied the right to vote in any poll and to keep this vote private.

3. As long as the rules of Apolyton are not violated, freedom of speech and the right to associate into any form of organization shall not be denied.

4. No Citizen may be punished in any way without the consent of the Court. Still no one shall be banned permanently from participating in the Democracy Game, excluding those who are permanently banned from Apolyton. Note that people may still be banned for any amount of time, as long as it is not permanent.

5. The government may not knowingly hide information or give false information to the people. Therefore all Citizens shall have access to the saved games. However, no Citizen shall ever 'play ahead' or make irreversible changes to any of the saved games.



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PS: Shoudnt we move the Bill of Rights discussion to a new thread? Maybe cut this thread in half would do the trick.

Strictly speaking that might be a good idea but so far there's only 3 posts or so on the topic and the BoR and Polling discussions are partly mangled up within posts, so not a terribly good idea to split the thread. But it's not a big subject anyway, only 5-10 lines of text (Although I always hope many people will give feedback, I wouldn't be surprised if after this post only 2 or 3 more posts were made on the subject). As long as it's manageable, we can keep it here, IMHO.

[F-PRO]

Originally posted by Locutus
2) An example of making irreversible changes it to switch government (so effectively to switch to Anarchy): you don't play ahead (as you don't end the turn), but you do change the game irreversibly, as you can't cancel a revolution once it's started. Same with diplomacy: diplomatic agreements change the AI state without requiring you to end the turn. People might do this to see how it affects the game and use this knowledge to vote a certain way in polls. This should not be allowed.
Other things, like adding specialists or changing war state, are reversible within the same gameturn without having an affect on the gamestate. IMHO this should be (and in other DGs is) allowed, so you don't have to rely entirely on textfiles and reference charts and stuff when determining what to vote for...

I think Pedrunn believes that the rule has been made to prevent people from making changes to the game which we don't want, i.e. ruining the game we all play.
But the rule has been created (correct me if I'm wrong) so that people don't make some decisions in the game and see how it works out. In that way they know what's the right course of action (or the wrong) and it's basically cheating.

[Pedrunn]

On Polls:
1) We could have those rules at least to have something to deal with this situation. Still I think we will never use them although it may happen often. My confirmed voting system is just to make those types of polls more serious and not light as you stated in the impeachment comment. Of course many people may not like this so there is the possibility to change that. Maybe a poll on this issue would be nice.

2) "Resolution" looks better. But "law" could be used without any problemand it is a short word what is nice.
As i said it is just semanthics.

Impeachment-> The impeachement of a person leaves two questions only.
-- How to decide if a person should be impeached? As you know i suggest through Law ( or resolution) poll. If half of the citzen agree and the court declare the poll valid (the court should alway declare the vality of the first 3 types of poll) he is out.
-- Who will replaced the impeached person? I sugest the supreme Senior or the playing of the game is stopped. Of course until new ellection have been held.

Anyway, we should save this discussion to another thread

On Bill of Rights.

1) Sorry, it exist a similar word in portuguese. So i thought it exist in english (you'd be amazed on how much words look like). Looks like it doesnt. What I meant by fiscalize was "To Control", to "Supervise". Not that it will change much after all.
Sorry anyway

2) I misunderstood you. You are right we must have such line. F-PRO statement about my mistakly thought is correct.

3) I noticed the abiguity you meant. Looks better now.

PS: Shoudnt we move the Bill of Rights discussion to a new thread? Maybe cut this thread in half would do the trick.

Never mind is too late now.



I guess we are praticly done with the Poll and Bill of Rights articles then.

[Turambar]

Great work on this everyone! Is it ready to be published/polled yet?

[RunsWithDwarf]

Re; Impeachment
Locutus unless there are objections I would reccomend
handling Impeachment the way we do here in the U.S.
as far as who serves as leader in the interim until new
elections are held. The responibility usually falls on the
Vice-President, or in the case that he is also implicated
in whatever circumstances that lead to the impeachment
of the President, then it falls on the shoulders of the
Secretary of Defense, and after him the Secretary of State etc, etc. which by the way are all cabinet appointed positions hand picked by the President, none
of them with the exception of the Vice-President are duly elected officials although most all of them have served in government positions in one branch
or another for some considerable length of time whether
it be in an official capacity or simply as advisors with some expertise in one area or another. Or finally in the
highly unlikely case that all the Presidents cabinet are
implicated or mysteriously killed in some freak accident,
terrorist act, coup attempt (and there have been a few in our sordid history, some successful, and from within
the Presidents own cabinet), or war, the responsibility
then falls on the chairman of the House Senate who is
an elected official but is nominated for this position from
within congress and from within thier own ranks.
Obviously this system is not perfect and would most likely require some considerable fine tuning as far as
using it for gaming purposes, especially considering that
it sounds like all the positions in this Democracy government will be duly elected positions instead of
government appointed positions, but it does have it's
merits, and would promote smooth flow of government
during the transition of power, instead of the chaos that
comes with putting a halt to everything while a new
Presidential election takes place.

[RunsWithDwarf]

One more thing, the reason I mentioned the case of the
the Presidents whole cabinet being killed is because I'm
not quite sure if its been decided what module will be used and irregardless of which is used, If we survive as
a nation to reach a modern age we then have to contend with the chance that a rival nation that is not in
agreement of our foriegn policies will make an assassination attempt upon our glorious leader and/or
other duly elected officials.
Although I'm not quite sure what the assassination attack does per-say as I've never attempted to use it
myself, I would assume it has nothing to do with a
sniper in the wood taking potshots at innocent citizens,
as that would be very incondusive to bringing about
national reform or change in government or its policies.
Otherwise, if this does not sound feasible then I guess
the issue of what to do in said circumstances would be
left up to debate, or perhaps another poll.
"Ahh! the wheels of Government, much like the wheels
of Justice turns, Oh So Slow"

[Pedrunn]

The responibility usually falls on the
Vice-President, or in the case that he is also implicated
in whatever circumstances that lead to the impeachment
of the President, then it falls on the shoulders of the
Secretary of Defense, and after him the Secretary of State etc, etc. which by the way are all cabinet appointed positions hand picked by the President, none

Comes the problem. We cant afford too many government positions because there are too few citzen. And all Covernment position are elected by the people and not chose by the president. So do we need to have a second person to all governmant positions.

the responsibility
then falls on the chairman of the House Senate who is
an elected official but is nominated for this position from
within congress and from within thier own ranks.

We cant have a congress. The democracy game community is too small. It has only 31 citzens now we could only pick someone from it. But this would be unfair for the other people who also want to be part of the gov

Or finally in the
highly unlikely case that all the Presidents cabinet are
implicated or mysteriously killed in some freak accident,
terrorist act, coup attempt

Lets kill them all. ANARCHY!!!
(*I guess i better give up *)
If they are all (or a good part) killed, resigned or impeached we must freeze the game and have the ellections. Thats my opinion.

Locutus, I have been considering not to have the confirmed posts system. I want it to be more effective therefore giving more power to the citzens. As you noticed i belive the more the power and the choices of our empire is defined by the citzens the better. What is you opinion about it. Do you think it will be better without it? Can the Laws (resolutions) have the same power without this idea?

[Locutus]

In the light of the new Civgroups feature (I knew it was coming but I didn't know it would be this fast and this powerful ), I suggest that rules 1(b), 4-III(e) and 4-IV(e) (regarding PM and confirmed polling) are removed, as it will soon be impossible for non-Citizens to vote in any polls. Pedrunn and others, do you agree?

Regarding Impeachment, I think I'd rather wait until we know exactly what government positions will exist and what powers they will have before going into that in too much detail. The fact that we don't know if we will even have a Vice-President or a Secretary of State or whatever, makes it kind of hard to decide on who should replace impeached officials...

As far as Assassinations go, according to the GL they mean that an important official in a specific city is assassinated, so a local politician as opposed to a national one. Either way, I don't think that in-game assassinations should affect the forum government (not in the last place because I've never seen the AI actually use this feature).

[Pedrunn]

Pedrunn and others, do you agree?

I had already agreed at the moment i saw the annoucement.
It will solve most of my fears!
thanks apolyton

Either way, I don't think that in-game assassinations should affect the forum government (not in the last place because I've never seen the AI actually use this feature).

I was just kidding. Kill leaders should not happen ever.
And i think RunsWithDwarf was just giving an example, wasnt him?
But giving a second thought would be fun to have this feature. We could talk about it later. And even have a votation about it for sure.

makes it kind of hard to decide on who should replace impeached officials...

I will start a thread about impeachment today at night or tomorrow about this if anyone does it first.

(g) A record must be kept of all Laws that are passed, amended, or removed. The person who proposed a Law that has been passed must add this Law to the record as soon as possible.

What should the record be for? Just to keep track and a history, right ?
I thought the effects of the resolutions (laws) polls were immediate and of single use.

eg. impeachment, punish a certain citizen, must attack a city, attack that army, send a proposal to that civ, change gov, change military stage, disband a certain city, etc...

You see what kind of power i want to give the citzens over the governments with those polls?!?
The ones that was going to be used in many ocasion therefore became rule were the amendments wich had to be written in the constitution.
Are we having different ideas for tthe resolution (law) type of polls?

[RunsWithDwarf]

Yes Pedrunn, Thank You! I was just giving an example.
I understand there aren't enough players per-say to have a congress, I was attempting to explain how our system works in the event of an Impeachment or Assassination, not neccessarily to endorse it, but the basic principle of the system is still feasible no matter how many government officials you have. We don't want to have a situation like the one in Israel they've had 7 Prime Ministers in nearly as many years and may be holding elections again within 90 days.

[RunsWithDwarf]

Yes Pedrunn, Thank You! I was just giving an example.
I understand there aren't enough players per-say to have a congress, I was attempting to explain how our system works in the event of an Impeachment or Assassination, not neccessarily to endorse it, but the basic principle of the system is still feasible no matter how many government officials you have. We don't want to have a situation like the one in Israel they've had 7 Prime Ministers in nearly as many years and may be holding elections again within 90 days.
Also, I'm not quite sure I would want to put every issue before a citizens committee before it's acted upon, I think if you trusted the indivdual enough to represent you and your best interest to elect them to office, then some small amount of leeway to act on your behalh would be in order, otherwise you may as well give them the title of Errand Boy

[Pedrunn]

Hey, RunsWithDwarf (funny name by the way) check out what i have written for the impeachment/ assassination stuff in the Article: Government Changes thread.
I am eagerly waiting your comments.

Also, I'm not quite sure I would want to put every issue before a citizens committee before it's acted upon, I think if you trusted the indivdual enough to represent you and your best interest to elect them to office, then some small amount of leeway to act on your behalh would be in order, otherwise you may as well give them the title of Errand Boy

It is not that every act should pass the citizens opinion. But the citizens that can change every act of the governors.
Since the lawsuit is started by any citizen only and whenever a citizen think something has to be done diferently.
I hope you got what i mean.

[RunsWithDwarf]

Yes Pedrunn, I think I understand quite cleary what your saying, but I also see where this type of citizenry power could under certain circumstances tie up the courts in legal litigation for an undetermined length of valuable time, eg; if you have 5 or more citizens, and each one of them has a different opinion on what's to be done and they all decide to file suit. Do you see what I'm getting at here? Perhaps it would be better to have a poll in this situation, and go with the majority vote.