WHEREAS various problems in the conduct of the 55th Cosă elections have shown that the list of emails and contact details held by the Chancery's Bureau of the Census under El Lexhatx C.1.2.2. are faulty;
AND WHEREAS the Electoral Database (Lexh D.8.5) and the Contact Database (Lexh D.8.8 ) are subsets of the above list of all citizen and suffer from the same problems;
AND WHEREAS, if we want a properly up-to-date database of contact details for all Talossans, we should remove the Organic loophole whereby a citizen can avoid keeping their contact details updated by regularly voting:BE IT ENACTED that Organic Law X.5 be amended as follows:
QuoteSection 5 Any citizen who neither votes in any general election nor responds fails to respond to any national census established by law for a period of two years, as calculated at any Election Deadline, shall be deemed to have renounced his or her citizenship.
As before, I am a supporter of mandatory voting and will resist any effort to undo it. I believe very firmly that mandatory voting is good for Talossa, and that if a person cannot be bothered to vote, especially when it is made so easy, then they do not care about remaining a citizen in the first place.
Because the only functional difference between this bill and the status quo is the removal of mandatory voting, I plan to vote and campaign against it.
Might I suggest a change, so that it is palatable?
Quote...Organic Law X.5 be amended as follows:
Quote(a) A citizen of Talossa shall have as a condition of his or her citizenship the express rights and duties (i) to vote in all those elections and referenda at which he or she may be entitled to vote, and (ii) to answer completely and in good faith any national census established by law.
(b) When any citizen should fail to vote for twenty-four consecutive months, or fail to answer any national census at all, then they shall be deemed to have renounced their own citizenship.
(Edit: I had to change some of the language.)
It may be too stringent to force renunciation for just one national census, so another option could be (bolded and underlined)...
Quote...Organic Law X.5 be amended as follows:
Quote(a) A citizen of Talossa shall have as a condition of his or her citizenship the express rights and duties (i) to vote in all those elections and referenda at which he or she may be entitled to vote, and (ii) to answer completely and in good faith any national census established by law.
(b) When any citizen should fail to vote for twenty-four consecutive months, or fail to answer a national census twice consecutively, then they shall be deemed to have renounced their own citizenship.
Well, what you're doing there is making the law more stringent than it is already, by fully restoring compulsory voting. The issue is that to keep your citizenship now, you can vote all the time or keep your email address at the Chancery up to date, which really satisfies no-one.
What I suggest is: I'll stick with my original wording, and you introduce your own bill to put compulsory voting in the OrgLaw. They should be written so they don't conflict with each other, and so one or both or neither will pass and the result will still make sense.
BTW this is why I don't like compulsory voting
(https://wittenberg.talossa.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=369.0;attach=119)
That type of force and intimidation also requires that ballots be public or available for scrutiny. Here in Talossa, and elsewhere in the Western World, ballots are secret; a political machine or terrorist group can cajole and threaten all it wants, but it won't succeed if it can't know or spoil voters' ballots.
I reiterate again: if a citizen of Talossa cannot be bothered to vote, especially in consideration that it is made so easy and convenient, then they have already effectively renounced their citizenship. I stand by compulsory voting, I stand by the three-strikes rule and, without amendments to this bill, I will vote against it for those reasons.
I am now in a mood to withdraw this bill. The reason being:
@the outgoing SoS informs me that the Census is
less effective in getting people to keep their contact details updated than "three strikes". If this is true, and agreed by his successor, then I've been wrong all along and compulsory voting is necessary :D
Fwiw, I don't think the census is completely useless.
From what I understand the original point was mostly to give those who would rather express their talossanity in some other way than voting an alternative. The downside of that is that perhaps fewer people vote, the upside is that perhaps more people who don't like politics stick around. I suspect both these effects are rather minor and only concern a small percentage of the population.
In addition, we get some nice statistics, and I was hoping, with Iasons help, to use location data from the census to track citizens who are assigned to the wrong province and provide them the option of changing province. None of this is crucial to our existence, but it's nice, and I think the census hasn't lived up to its full potential yet. (I had hoped to ask mpf at some point in the future to make it so that the SoS can send send out census emails themselves, and maybe change the questions, but I never got around to that.)
The thing about incorrect contact information though is that you will get neither the census nor the ballot when the chancery hasn't got your email and the latter will just always result in a lot more people (namely, politicians that want to be elected) telling you to do something about it. As a result, fixing email addresses has become pretty much a main part of running the election.
Throwing out citizens who vote but dont fill out the census would have a crippling effect I fear.
Compulsory voting on the other hand, I'm not so sure about. There is definitely a good argument for it.
However, perhaps the current system isn't all that bad. It's a bit messier maybe, but mostly it does its job at keeping Talossans on board, without filling the rolls with people who have permanently left Talossa behind.
Yes, it's been a long way round but I've come to the conclusion that the current system works better than any immediate obvious alternatives.