Bill: One Person, One Citizenship, One Vote

In my opinion, the most critical question faced by the city, is whether or not we should adhere to a policy of one person, one vote. I feel that allowing a single person to have multiple alts in the city subverts the democratic process and weakens the RA.

I would like to submit a bill to the RA that alts should not be allowed to vote. Further, I would like to submit that alts not be allowed to own land in the city at all. I'd like a policy of "one person, one citizenship, one vote".

Beyond all the discourse over the constitution, this is one issue that unambiguously impacts whether or not we can call ourselves a democracy. What do you think?


I've attached a fun little poll. It's results are nonbinding, of course.

~Ulrika~

I second that

One person, One Citizenship, One Vote.

Mama likes.

Aye, Aye! Drag your friends into the city if your views need more influence!

No. That'll be our next sim based on Shanghai.

Why does Bill only get one vote?

*ducks*

I agree with the "all one" idea.

Although I hope the overall land ownership limits are eased a little when we do expand into further sims. A far away thing, but it's the only reason I'd support "one citizenship, as many alt landowners as you need".

The only reason which the land ownership limits were proposed and written into the covenants was to support the concept of "one human being citizen, one vote", which I feel underlies the whole concept of Neualtenburg. A limit of 4096m2 per citizen simply prevents one citizen from buying so much land that there is not enough for others, thereby allowing the city to grow to a healthy size population.

Land ownership is not really the issue here. "One human being citizen, one vote" underlies everything. If it isn't clear, then it should be written.

The real issue is the problem of what to do about those "human beings" who maintain multiple avatars. Rudeen Edo is my alt. I see absolutely no reason why Rudeen Edo cannot be a citizen of Neualtenburg, INSTEAD of Sudane Erato. The word "alt" is a very misleading usage which has developed in SL. Let us simply deal with the fact that a human being can appear in SL as one of a number of different avatars.

If then there is universal agreement on the principle of "one human being citizen, one vote", then the only remaining issue is to determine how the principle is enforced. Here we run into trouble. Linden Labs, with full RL access to credit card information, has been unsuccessful in regulating the use by human beings of multiple avatars. This problem as we all know is particularly acute in the matter of human beings who are banned from SL for violations of the ToS and who then re-enter SL using a different credit card. I think we find that LL has been rather thoroughly unsuccessful at dealing with this problem.

Enforcement of the principle of "one human being, one vote" entails exactly the same problem. I would propose that what LL cannot solve, with its corporate resources, Neualtenburg cannot solve either.

Since, therefore, the principle of "one human being, one vote" is central to the very core of Neualtenburg, and since, also, it is demonstratably impossible for Neualtenburg with the resources at its disposal to enforce this principle; I suggest that we add the statement of principle to the appropriate document, along with some "statement of seriousness", such as:

"Since the concept of 'one human being citizen, one vote' is central and primary to the spirit and intention of the community of Neualtenburg, it is assumed that all citizens will respect and adhere to this principle."


Sudane

If we go to "paypal" payments only -- instead of Linden payments (yes I realize that Linden money is more valuable), then it would be a small matter of simply having every citizen declare a list of AVs associated with their e-mail.

One could simply check voting records, and declared AV "family" against paypal payment records. Perhaps the voting could be coded so that the vote choice remain hidden, but the actual fact of vote is not.

The paypal fees would be a small price to pay for national Security.

I think a Neualtenburg census is in order.

Since everyone probably hates me already anyway, I will jump in here and strongly disagree with this proposal as well.

As Sudane points out it is basically impossible to tell if someone is an alt, so the proposal is singularly unworkable. The only way to find out is to violate the Linden TOS which we have already stated "supercedes all provisions" in the Nburg TOS and the constitution.

I know several players that are "roleplaying" (not Nburgers), in SL and have several "characters." If one of those folks chosese to buy two pieces of property in Nburg and pays all the bills, I don't see how one can argue that this is essentially different from any other avatar.

I totally supprt one person one vote in RL but I dont see how it applies the same way in SL. It seems to me that in second life, an avatar *is* a person.

.

At work on break, trying to type fast:

I will vote for the "One person, one citizenship, one vote." if the following things are taken into consideration:

1. In a situation where you have a RL couple that are citizens, voting from the same IP address, they should both be able to be recognized as citizens and not just alts of each other. Perhaps having a registry of who is a citizen and thus who is allowed to vote would help with this?

2. As Sudane stated, I think this concept, no matter how much we agree with it, will be very hard to police. An honor code type statement like she suggested would be good to have in the documents I think.


Those are my two concerns, but otherwise I am in full agreement with "One person, one citizenship, one vote."


As for Kendra's suggestion, if we went to PayPal only for payments, I would need to withdraw from Neualt. I am only able to pay in Lindens and be a part of this project. Long story, but that is my situation.

Hey, I'm just tossing out ideas -- not married to the idea.

Talking about roleplayers is all fine and dandy, but the point remains, no matter how many avatars you might "own", there's just one entity behind them all. Allowing one person to have multiple voices because they split up the money they might contribute to Neualtenburg into chunks is just silly and defeats all intention to make any portion of the government representive of those in it. Should I have bought the three plots that became the Field of Can'-Ka no Rey as seperate avvies? Should someone be allowed to buy up the entire city with a couple of dozen alts?

I feel we will have to police it much as Linden Labs polices SL as a whole for underage users - we must recognize that it's essentially impossible to identify alts, but be swift to act when one reveals itself.

PayPal accounts can mask identities too. When we were testing how to use PayPal, I discovered that I could create intermediate accounts. What I do now is use my family PayPal account to pay my Ulrika PayPal account and from there use my Ulrika PayPal account to pay Neualtenburg. Theoretically, I could create one intermediate PayPal account for every alt.


The other way we could do things is to weigh votes based on land ownership. I know, I know. Let me just throw this out there to show you what I mean.

This is the result after a standard vote:

Faction Vote (Borda Count)     Score    Percent
  Moderate Peoples Party          11      64.7%
  Social Democratic Faction        6      35.2%

Faction Seat Allocation
  Sainte-Lague Method V/(2s+1), Borda Count
  Votes           MPP     SDF   Seat
 --------------------------------------------
  Seat 1        11.000  6.000   MPP
  Seat 2        3.667   6.000   SDF
  Seat 3        3.667   2.000   MPP
  Seat 4        0.733   2.000   SDF
  Seat 5        0.733   0.400   MPP
 --------------------------------------------
  Seats         3       2 
  Percent       60%     40% 

This is the result of a land-weighted vote:

Faction Vote (Borda Count)     Score    Percent
  Moderate Peoples Party       16736      62.4%
  Social Democratic Faction    10064      37.5%

Faction Seat Allocation
  Sainte-Lague Method V/(2s+1), Borda Count, Land Weighted
  Votes           MPP     SDF   Seat
 --------------------------------------------
  Seat 1        16736   10064   MPP
  Seat 2         5578   10064   SDF
  Seat 3         5578    3354   MPP
  Seat 4         1115    3354   SDF
  Seat 5         1115     670   MPP
 --------------------------------------------
  Seats         3       2 
  Percent       60%     40% 

Same thing. The members' rank within the factions are the same as well.

Coupled with limitation on how much land one could own, I think this system would work. It's just choice between codifying and regulating a quasidemocratic process or having a democratic system based on the honor system.

Just something to think about. I have no intentions of pushing for this. I just thought the numbers were interesting.

~Ulrika~

Exactly! Now you all know why I was so cautious when the election results came in.

~Ulrika~

I agree: One person, one citizenship, one vote.

I think we just need an honor code and to keep our eyes out for suspicion. People are not inherently bad, and the ones who are, are usually easy to pick out.

Weighting votes based on land ownership brings back bad moments in American History. Although since we already have a work stoppage it might also be fun to watch the less fortunate start shooting rifles at the well to do (and powerful).

The IP address concept is tough, because if someone is going to decieve the city, they might be smart enough to do it from a friends house, public net connection, or web proxy. Especially after what happened this time...

Suspicion of foul play is no reason to change a process that clearly worked for this election. The suspicions turned out to have a logical answer.

Overall I think Ulrika did an OK job at handling the IP address thing. It was the keep your eyes out for suspicion I was talking about. She may have outfoxed herself, and I had to hear 2 weeks worth of jokes inworld from friends who know Digi and I, but she was just validating the results. During the next election, decisions like that can start internally with an election committee.

How about a census?

I'll start:

Kendra Bancroft
Sissie Maracas (alt)
Gerlach Beckenbauer (alt)

Some folks might not want to give away their alts if they're used for other things outside of the city. As long as they don't own land here, it's not a problem.

I don't have many avatars:
Ulrika Zugzwang
Uma Bauhaus (city alt)
Philip Linden

You all knew those though.

~Ulrika~

you forgot to mention Kendra Bancroft (alt)

I was actually thinking of listing all the members of the SDF but then I thought that wouldn't be so funny given the topic of the thread.

~Ulrika~

Aliasi Stonebender is me, of course.

Convex and Concave Surface are alts, but used *only* to establish the group I needed to have land in Neualtenburg; I log 'em in once a week to take their money and that's it.

Keynes Mechanique is an alt that likes to help Satchmo test multiplayer games (that we develop together).

He also worships John Maynard Keynes

I have one alt that was created for the purpose of getting land in Neualt.

Dari Duport


I will get another alt one day so that the person helping me as the third member of my land group can get their group spot back. I'll let you all know when I do!

Adrian Nico's my alt. I use Adrian occasionally to venture into the public sandboxes with out getting harrassed and noobed up.

It seems like we're all generally in agreement. It looks like Sudane has reversed her opinion on the subject, originally posed in this thread. In that post, she made some good points why we shouldn't adopt the one-person one-vote policy. I thought I'd use those points for discussions, as we should all understand what we're getting ourselves into, if we do make one person one vote a law.

The quote above is in reference to the fact that I had to investigate two matching IP addresses. If we do agree that there will be one person and one vote, than we must create a voting system which tries to verify this and have an SC willing to discretely investigate unusual results. I wanted to state this specifically, as one person one vote requires verification and enforcement. How do you feel about one person one vote given that we will need to verify and enforce?

Here's a very good point. If someone does want to have multiple alts in Neualtenburg and they have access to SL through various computers at work and home, how would we ever know? LL itself can't even track or stop such behavior. However, if we do decide to make that a law, we will have to verify and enforce it and it's only a matter of time before someone is caught. What do we do with them then? What is the punishment for voting twice in our democracy?

(Also, why did you reverse your opinion on this Sudane?)

In the list of demands given above, numbers 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 violate the constitution, so I'll skip those. The important ones are 1 and 2.

If we choose to make voting verifiable, then votes cannot be be unretrievably private. If they are, then, if someone finds a way to vote twice, we'll never know which of the votes were fraudulent. This includes the bug in the software that allowed a single person to vote twice as well as alt voting. How would you all feel about me returning with election results saying that 26 of 20 votes are in?

My solution with the current system is to include an IP address and a hash number that uniquely identifies an avatar and is only reversible by someone who knows the secret hash key. It seems like an excellent compromise. There's guaranteed mathematical secrecy that is only undone in the event of a inquiry.

What are your thoughts?

~Ulrika~