Article: Government Changes

[H Tower]

i have a beef with section 1(i) instead of the person with less experience getting the job. the other members of the incoming cabinet should vote on who should get the spot. At least that's what were doing in the civ2 game because the runoff for president ended in a tie.

[Locutus]

I like H Tower's idea of having the Ministers and President decide who will fill get a spot in case of a tie The idea of using the most experienced person was merely to avoid going by number of posts, which is in direct violation of Apolyton's anti-spam policy...

Rather than halting the game, this would be a good alternative in case of a disappearing Minister too: while new elections are being held, the President (with the support of his Minsters) appoints a temporary minister to keep the game going (assuming we don't have a VP to do so, otherwise the VP can do it).

Zaphod, if we don't make proper rules now that will no doubt be fun for some people later on, but it will quite probably frustrate others. We want to avoid that some people have fun at the expense of others...

Re: Abstaining. Abstaining should only count to the number of votes, not to yes/no or any other option. So if 1/3 of the population needs to vote to pass a resolution, abstain votes count towards reach that quotum, but they don't count towards the 50% yes vote to pass that resolution.

About the Court getting too much power: I disagree. The only time when the Court gets to decide is when there *is* no valid candidate (or when it's a tie and a deadlock on breaking it). In the real world, I don't think this ever happened...

RunsWithDwarf,
For the other articles I've written summaries to make clear in a few sentences what the essence of the article is. I (or someone else) will do this for article too. For day-to-day use, these summaries are probably adequate for most people, these detailed rules are needed to lay down the exact procedures and avoid misinterpretation and exploitation, however 'political' this may be. All other DGs have seen situations where the rules proved inadequate, we should learn from that and try to avoid it as much as possible in this game...

I agree that temporary appointments should not count as a full term when it comes to determining if someone can run for an office. So in 1(g) "consecutive terms" should IMHO be replaced with "consecutive full terms".

[H Tower]

I'm assuming that we'll have more than one judge, probablly three I'd say. What will the election poll look like? Does everyone just vote once and the top three vote getters become judges? Or do we break the candidates into three groups and elect one from each group? Hears what I think should be done though, mirroring what the AC demo game did, they put all the poential judges in one poll, and made it multiple choice, telling people to only vote for X number of candidates. I think that an interesting part of this could be people voting for FEWER people than they are supposed to, that way they could make sure their favorite candidate gets a better shot at being elected.

Anybody else got thoughts on how we'll elect judges?

[Frozzy]

I believe that the Assembly (Ministers + President) should vote for the judges, n (number of spots open) votes each. After all, they know more about whats going on than the average Beeble on the Forums

[Gilgamensch]

Why should we leave it to the assembly to vote for the judges, they are supposed to be our ones

Also, as we only will have ~4 position in the government, would make it quite hard for them to vote for three judges.

So I still stay with: we will vote for the judges.

We could leave it for the government to decide, who is gonna be the senior judge.

In case one of the ministers disappearing into a black hole (oh sorry wrong game ), the Grand Apolyton could nominate a 'replacement', which would be needed to be passed by the ministers and/or court. I think this would be the quickest way.

And hey, if we don't like it, we can appeal to the court for new elections

For the constitution:

We will always have holes in it, somebody might always find a 'backdoor' for something.........

And NO, during election we should continue the game. Only exception I see is in case of impeachment and similar. But this we could leave first to the court and/or poll.

[Frozzy]

Meh... 3 day By-election for disappearing ministers (should we blame that on the Finns too, in true OTF style? H Tower???)

The term must be longer than a month. It'll take a while to change the data, etc. 2 months minimum

[Pedrunn]

Originally posted by H Tower
I'm assuming that we'll have more than one judge, probablly three I'd say.

from the Court Article from the constitution draft section 2-a "The Court is composed of 3 Judges..."

Originally posted by H Tower
What will the election poll look like? Does everyone just vote once and the top three vote getters become judges? Or do we break the candidates into three groups and elect one from each group?
...
Anybody else got thoughts on how we'll elect judges?

The locutus suggestion in the Court thread looks the best:

Originally posted by Locutus
It would IMHO make more sense to, rather than electing 3 Judges every 3 months, elect 1 Judge every month. Then 2 polls could be held: one for the new Judge, one for who of the other two should become Senior Justice (better let the n00b get used to the job before giving him such power ). I could be overlooking something, but this seems to solve all aforementioned problems...

This should be explained in the Court article since this article is just to say how general elections are held. Not when (end of the term is enough).

[Pedrunn]

UPDATE

1. Elections:

(a) The Court is empowered to oversee all elections and is empowered to resolve any election disputes according to the rules in this Constitution.
(b) An election for a given government position is started if the term of the position has ended or the person in the position can no longer perfom his duties.
(c) If the reason for an election is the end of a term, the election process must start seven days before the end of the given government position term. The previous official will remain in office until the end of the term or until a new candidate is elected, whichever is the later.
(d) If the reason is the decision that the person in the government position can no longer perfom his duties. The election process must start immediately after this decision is made. Until a new candidate has been elected, the other members of the branch of government in question will appoint a substitute to temporarily take over the open position, allowing the game to continue."
(e) At the start of the election process, all citizens who wish to be candidates for an office must publicly express their candidacy. For this they have two days. No citizen may be a candidate for an elected office if such candidacy might cause him to be in more than one elected office simultaneously.
(f) Once the time in which citizens may express their candidacy for a given elected office has expired, the Court will create an Election poll (see Article II, section 3.I) for the office, with the names of the candidates as options. The poll shall expire in five days.
(g) If a person has been elected into the same government office for two consecutive terms, that person may not run for that specific office for a third time. After this third term, he or she may run for that office again.
(h) If only one candidate is available for an office, a Yes/No poll shall be held to decide if this person may serve in this office. This poll shall expire in five days.
(i) The candidate who received the majority of the votes and the election thread expires, this person will be declared the new holder of the office for which he was a candidate.
(j) In case of a tie in the election poll, the Court should count the number of times each candidate was previously part of the government. The candidate with fewer prior terms in the government is chosen. If the tie persists the candidate who has been registered on Apolyton for the longest period of time will be chosen. If the tie still persists, the Court will decide which candidate is chosen.
(k) In the event that there is no candidate for any government position, the Court must immediately choose a willing Citizen for this office. The appointed citizen must be confirmed by a majority of the voters in a Yes/No poll that shall last three days.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sumary.

- The members of a the same branch which an office wich its officer can no longer perform its duty will choose a substitute. As sugested.
- The second stage of the election poll was totally removed from the article due to the votation of the citzens of the CTP2DG community.
- The election poll takes 5 days as requested.
- To The court was given the power to choose a willing citzen to run for a position which has no candidate for the election in all cases.
- A person can only run for a position two consecutive time oppose to three.

[Locutus]

I'd like to rephrase the last part of 1(d): "Until a new candidate has been elected, the other members of the branch of government in question will appoint a substitute to temporarily take over the open position, allowing the game can continue."

Why did you chane 1(g)? I thought it was just fine the way it was and I don't think anyone else had a problem with it either, or did I miss something? I fear we might get a problem filling all positions later on in the game, so we should be a bit flexible here...

1(h) and 1(l) should be changed from 3 to 5 days.

1(j) should be changed to take into account what has been discussed. I'll rewrite the whole thing:

(j) In case of a tie in an election poll where there are more than two candidates, there shall be a run-off election between the two candidates who received the most votes. This run-off poll shall last three days.
(k) In case of a tie in a run-off poll for a position in the Executive branch of government, the other members of the incoming cabinet shall vote on who should get the position. In case of a tie there, the newly appointed Senior Justice shall have the decisive vote.
(l) In case of a tie in a run-off poll for a position in the Judicial branch of government, the other members of the Court shall vote on who should get the position. In case of a tie there, the newly appointed President shall have the decisive vote.

[Pedrunn]

What was edited:

Originally posted by Locutus
I'd like to rephrase the last part of 1(d): "Until a new candidate has been elected, the other members of the branch of government in question will appoint a substitute to temporarily take over the open position, allowing the game can continue."

I hated to do that phrase. I knew it need some changes. Thanks.
I will edit it.

1(h) and 1(l) should be changed from 3 to 5 days.

Oops. I will edit the post. It should be written 5.

What to be discussed

Why did you chane 1(g)? I thought it was just fine the way it was and I don't think anyone else had a problem with it either, or did I miss something? I fear we might get a problem filling all positions later on in the game, so we should be a bit flexible here...

No specific reason. The idea of three max times was from the CIV3DG. But i really wanted to hear a comment on that since the beggining. So i managed this change to spice things up.
Note that two max times is more like real life democracy.

(j) In case of a tie in an election poll where there are more than two candidates, there shall be a run-off election between the two candidates who received the most votes. This run-off poll shall last three days.
(k) In case of a tie in a run-off poll for a position in the Executive branch of government, the other members of the incoming cabinet shall vote on who should get the position. In case of a tie there, the newly appointed Senior Justice shall have the decisive vote.
(l) In case of a tie in a run-off poll for a position in the Judicial branch of government, the other members of the Court shall vote on who should get the position. In case of a tie there, the newly appointed President shall have the decisive vote.

Actually, this was just mentioned. The dicussion about ties shall start now. I was just waiting someone to comment this.
I will post about it tommorrow.

[Locutus]

dp

[Locutus]

End of 1(d) should be "allowing the game to continue" BTW, couldn't choose between two formulations but this merger or the two isn't quite the solution either

@number of terms. 3 makes sense to me. Two is more like real life American democracy, not like real life democracy... (It's unlimited in the Netherlands and IIRC 3 in Belgium, don't know about the rest of the world but 2 is a typical American custom (used to be an informal law, until FDR came along and decided to ignore it ))

Actually, the discussion on ties has been raging for days But I'm looking forward to your thoughts on it

[Gilgamensch]

unlimited terms............ Why should we limit it?

We might want to limit the number of terms for the 'leader'

[J Bytheway]

Originally posted by Pedrunn
(g) If a person has been elected into the same government office for two consecutive terms, that person may not run for that specific office for a third time. After this fourth term, he or she may run for that office again.

This last 'fourth' should be a 'third' for consistency (although I agree that permitting 3 consecutive terms is preferable), I think you should also change this to full terms as Locutus recommended.

Lastly, I don't think it's necessary to write 'he or she' - just 'he' is not only gramatically correct, but also almost certainly accurate in all cases in this situation.

[Locutus]

I agree on the 'full' terms (obviously).

On the 'he or she' issue: I think that would be nice to keep - I don't wanna piss off present or future female players by a 'male-centric' Constittion... We should value the few women that we have in our community (although I fear that AFAIK we don't have any right now )