Proposal :Vacancies

In order to move this question forward I'll make a couple of proposals

1 RA

A In the event of an RA member's announced permanent departure from the city, his or her seat goes to the next ranked member of the faction in the previous RA election until the next Ra election

B If an RA member misses two or more consecutive meetings, the faction leader has the option of naming the next ranked member of the faction to fill the seat on an interim basis during the vacancy.

C. If in the case of A or B above, there are no more members of the faction on the faction list of persons willing to serve from the last election, the faction leader may name any member of the faction to fill the seat until the next election.

Questions:

What does everyone think?

Can this be done with RA internal procedure, a law. or does it require constitutional change?(nudges SC)

SC

The curent de facto standard is that an SC member who steps off SC to serve in another branch is taking a leave of absence and returns to the SC at the end of his or her RA service. Since the SC does not have to have nine chairs, the chair remains vacant during the leave.

All we need to do here is codify this. Is it a matter of SC internal procedure or is legislation necessary?

Replacing missing RA members is already built into the current voting system. The Sainte-Laguë method of allocating seats is used in conjunction with internal faction rankings to generate a list of candidates. If an individual passes on a seat, one continues down the list awarding it to the next person.

For example, the Sainte-Laguë method generates a list like this:

1 SDF
2 DPU
3 MPP
4 SDF
5 DPU
6 MPP
7 SDF
8 DPU
9 MPP
...

Individuals are then placed into these seats using the internal faction rank. If a faction doesn't have enough people, a blank is inserted in that seat and it's skipped.

1 SDF Fred Flinstone
2 DPU Barney Rubble
3 MPP Doctor Who
4 SDF Captain Marvel
5 DPU Asterix
6 MPP Obelix
7 SDF Yogi the Bear
8 DPU --
9 MPP Bubba
10 SDF Julia Roberts
11 DPU --
12 MPP --
13 SDF -- (end of list because all three have run out of members to fill seats)

If the RA had five seats, the five members would be Fred, Barny, Dr. Who, Captain, and Asterix. If one of those members resigned, one moves down to the next person on the list, in this case Obelix. This means if you have a party member resign, there's a good chance the seat will move to another faction.

Looking at the list from last election, if Aliasi (or another member) departs the RA, the next person on the list is Eugene Pomeray, who by chance happened to return today. Also fortunate is the designer of the N'burg voting system just happens to be in town this week to explain it.

~Ulrika~

Hope you don't mind if a(nother) foreigner pokes his nose in on this one!

The Constitution (Article I, Section 2) states "Each faction controls their seats and may replace members or fill seats due to vacancies as they see fit."

Surely that means that if an RA member leaves it is up to the faction to supply a replacement member?

If you were to follow Ulrika's interpretation of the voting system, you'd have the seat potentially moving to a member of a different faction. That is surely a perverse outcome! If the leading faction loses a member (for personal reasons for example) it surely can't be right that their seat goes to another faction potentially upsetting the balance of the RA.

Patroklus, you beat me to it.

I have no idea why Ulrika explained it as she did. Perhaps I,2 doesn't mean what it appears to.

Unfortunately, Article IV, Section 2 states, in part



This contradicts the section you cited (I, 2), which of course gives wide latitude to the factions, It looks as if it will take an amendment one way or another.

Still, it seems clear that the intent of the Constitution is that if one RA member resigns, another member of *the same faction* replaces him/her.

Claude's poposal seems a reasonable attempt to honor both I,2 and IV,2. My only question is how do we define "vacancy" -- are 2 consecutive absences from RA meetings enough to be called a vacancy? In fact, are temporary vacancies really vacancies? Notice the language of IV,2 uses the word "retire".

I am inclined to think that when an RA member vacates a seat, he or she should do so for the remainder of the term.

Obviously, we want to declare a seat vacant if a citizen leaves without notice. Maybe the the test for that is 2 consecutive missed land fee payments? Other than that, I believe that if the RA member misses meetings, but is otherwise an upstanding citizen, he or she should formally resign from the RA for the seat to be vacant.

Oops. That part of the Constitution was written before the voting method was determined. As I recall the voting method information was added at the top of the section and it sounds like the legacy text at the bottom of that section wasn't removed. That means there's an inconsistency in the intent of the Constitution with two conflicting pieces of information.

Ultimately, it's up to the RA how it would like select seats. Unlike other amendments *cough*, clarifying this section would be beneficial.

~Ulrika~

I propose to strike the following from Article IV section 2

If a member retires from the RA, a member with the next highest
ranking in the same faction is takes a seat on the RA.

And to strike "replace members or" from Article I, Section 2

Rationale:
This would give the factions discretion as to how to fill vacancies. I have no problem with moving down the faction list, except, what happens when you run out of list? We're very close to having that happen for all three active factions. Note that the deletion in Article I prevents factions from forcing out sitting members of their own faction and replacing them.

The only problem with ignoring the list is that the replacement process becomes undemocratic, which is a bad thing for a democratic body. Instead I'd call for a reranking of members in a faction and pick the highest nonserving member. This would be more democratic and consistent with the current process. The only trick is that the ranking is usually secret (to prevent hurt feelings) and done by the SC. Just making a suggestion.

~Ulrika~

While I don't agree that it was necessary to have yet *another* explanation of the voting method and it seems to me that the rankings have usually been public, I have to agree with Ulrika's argument.

If we continue to use the voting ranking method that we do, that exists as a public record of the voting choice of the people from the last valid election. To simply appoint someone from the current ruling faction or party therefore goes against what we already know would be the populace's choice would be if they had their druthers.

While it's typical in party politics to let the current ruling party chose their own replacement, by no means do we have to use such a method. The use of the ranking implies that we do not ascribe to the "one party wins all" American style method, to then go back and say we will let whomever is currently in charge, stay in charge, and pick a new member from their own ranks seems to go against that idea IMO.

Well... I guess that the extreme case — no more members on a list to fill a vacant spot —would simply mean: new elections!

N'burg is supposed to be a long-term project, and people accepting a place in the RA should be willing to serve a whole term. If not, they can naturally still participate in everything that's great in Neualtenburg, without a "full commitment" to an official position (or they can join other governmental branches instead), and should not run for candidates for office. Of course, sometimes things happen against people's wills, and that's why we have a "replacement" strategy, but which works only to a point.

If suddenly a RA finds out it has not enough members (ie. no more people to fill in vacant spots on a party's list) to continue its appointed role as the legislative body of the City, it would be best to call for new elections, hopefully getting a different arrangement of votes that prevents an "empty" party list. Of course, this can only be changed through some further legislation (or, sadly, even amendments to the Constitution...).

I personally am quite against a member of one party to replace a member of another party, just because that party did not have enough members on their lists on the first place! Since we have a party-voting system (instead of voting directly on representatives), the notion that the party composition in the RA should reflect the voter's preferences is something I stubbornly defended in the past, and I'm not so willing to forfeit that principle. There are good reasons for my stubbornness. I'd like parties that are in the majority of the RA, which have a mandate from the citizens that elected them for their agenda's programme, to be able to implement that agenda until the end of term. By replacing RA representatives with members of different parties, the citizens might be cheated — the party they've voted for might be unable to implement their agenda by not having enough members at the RA! So, in my opinion, whenever this situation appears, it's best to end term and call for new elections.

There is no "external body" to define the term, but the RA sets it by themselves, so I'd recommend self-dissolution on that situation. Of course, anything of the above is the prerrogative of the RA to legislate upon — if they wish.

This is interesting. I never even thought of that angle.

I had been assuming a long list of candidates and that the general makeup of the list reflecting in general the balance of the party preference (as this is how the lists seemed to me in my memory).

I agree that it isn't necessarily fair to put someone from another party in merely because one party didn't field enough candidates. What about Ulrika's plan of recalculating the ranking based on the remaining candidates or votes? I am not so good at statistics that I can immediately see if that would be fair.

My agreement with Ulrika's idea stems mostly from my belief that it is patently *unfair* to have a party merely put another candidate up since that person may have:

- not received many (or any) actual votes from the populace in the initial election.
- may take the place of a person from another party that would have won if the original person to leave had not been in the race.

Suppose for instance two parties dominate and win the seats of the RA but a third party's candidate "just misses it." Through various people leaving, the two ruling parties refresh their ranks with members that may have got little (or any), of the voters confidence, yet the person in the third party that received a substantial vote but missed her seat by a hair, will still never get to sit. That doesn't seem fair to me. In that scenario, many more people would have voted for that third party person than any of the people that end up sitting in the RA seats.

The seats could also be manipulated by having a slate of "moderate" candidates that are palatable to the populace under the (secret) agreement that they step down after being elected. The "hard-liners" in the party then take their place and the evil plan is complete!

Perhaps merely leaving the seats vacant is the best alternative.

Ah, you're addressing very good questions, Dianne...

Yes, I'm actually always twitchy when I see people who weren't elected replacing others because of an "automatic system". But I guess I had too many recent bad experiences iRL regarding that, so this might make me biased towards those kinds of solutions.

Still, the Constitution says:


So that'll be the rule for now.

Aren't those two statements contradictory though? It might be up to the SC to pick one.

~Ulrika~

That was my impression.