Constitutional Amendment: Special Elections Amendment (Passed)

[Joseph Cao]

With all due respect to Ishan and Poirot, I'm not really sure that argument holds water.

Our special elections are a carryover from the USA OTL, where House special elections are held to fill a vacant seat for the remainder of a term. In OTL these elections are held within a district, with a specific electorate which is reasonably close to the electorate that previously elected the dead, expelled, resigning, or incapacitated representative. When we say "will of the people," this is the constituency of people we are referring to. But we use STV for House elections, and there is no guarantee that this OTL property will hold in Atlasia under those conditions. Technically speaking, the same nationwide electorate elected razze and Jessica in December. Their voters are scattered around the country, however, and it is not a given that, in the hypothetical event of a Jessica resignation, Jessica's voters will be the ones getting to decide on a replacement for the representative to whom they previously gave a mandate, even though they are the "people" whose will we wish to gauge. In fact, as things stand, they will always be overridden by razze voters. It is more democratic in the sense that the majority of our electorate would prefer a left-leaning representative to fill a vacancy, and thus a 9-0 House if all nine seats simultaneously required a special election for each seat.

If Lumine's goal is to give voters a direct say over who represents them, and we are referring to the voters who elected the vacating representative, then there is no directly democratic way of satisfying their will – it would be disingenuous to hold an election for them and them only. (Lumine can correct me if my assumption is faulty, of course, though the alternative would seem to be giving the nationwide electorate the final say over who gets elected to a seat that only a fraction of them previously voted on.) In existing situations where the party chair can appoint, statutory law can be modified to enforce an ideologically similar appointment to the vacating representative (as Yankee currently does) so as to preserve the will of the people who elected that representative. If the party chair is also required to explain their decision, so much the better for purposes of transparency. For situations where the chair is incapacitated or otherwise unable to fill the vacancy, or if the representative is an independent, that responsibility could pass to the Speaker, who would likewise be bound by statutory law to pick an ideologically similar representative. That would treat all parties equally and would eliminate the possibility of another Panty Raid.

[Joseph Cao]

To be clear, I'm not opposed to the argument that voters should pick their representatives. My opposition is based more on the assertion that we shouldn't be conflating the voters who picked the vacating representative and the entire electorate which would get to weigh in during a special election. The will of the people isn't really respected when we move from STV in regular elections to (what is effectively) FPTP in special elections.

In the specific event that parties fail to designate a replacement or are otherwise incapable of doing so, I would be open to supporting a special election. I passed over this in my earlier remarks because a) I was trying to argue for a self-consistent application of appointments across all possible scenarios, and b) my personal belief is that "the will of the people" is best respected when party chairs are formally or informally bound to pick ideologically similar representatives to fill vacancies. If the political interests of smaller-party members or independents can't be protected under this framework, then we ought to extend the framework to cover them.

[Joseph Cao]

Aye.

[Joseph Cao]

Aye.