SENATE BILL: Efficient Referenda Amendment (Failed)

[President Tyrion]

I'm inclined to vote against this. I typically don't like laws that centralize the Government and diminish the role of the Regions. I really don't understand why some regional executives are too inactive to open up a voting booth.

Not understanding it means you would choose to enable it?

[President Tyrion]

I'm inclined to vote against this. I typically don't like laws that centralize the Government and diminish the role of the Regions. I really don't understand why some regional executives are too inactive to open up a voting booth.

Not understanding it means you would choose to enable it?

One could argue that removal of responsbility, will also enable/encourage inactivity on the part of Regional executives.

Yeah, this is what I was trying to say. I think the solution should be for Regions to elect more active executives, not to eliminate this responsibility from their jobs.

So, let me get this straight:

1. Regional executives are often inactive, and do not open booths for federal amendments.
2. We are suggesting taking that responsibility from inactive actors.
3. You are suggesting we leave them this responsibility in the hopes that the people of these regions just elect more active regional executives.
4. There is fear that these regional executives will become more inactive because they will have less to do.

Twisted logic, to say the least.

Anyway, Griffin's amendment works that out rather nicely.

[President Tyrion]

Aye

[President Tyrion]

What makes you guys think that concentrating onto one person, a task that five other people presently do, is a good thing? What if something happens to them? Now all five regions are screwed whereras one might have had a temporary delay under the present system.

The difference is attention and people will raise hell if something goes wrong. That is the corrective mechanism and if it were brought to full force on the Regional Executives as well, we would have more to gain then just ensuring a booth gets opened on time, but numerous other improvements as well. Like I said at the beginning of the debate, constantly removing responsbilities, will only lead to one thing and that is more inactivity, not less.

By that same logic, you'd have five times as many people raising hell if homely (or someone else) were to open the booth late.

[President Tyrion]

Thats your Governor and your legislature. It should be our aim to treat the Regions as responsbile governoring bodies and if one more is not then that should be changed as soon as possible.

Here is the issue, and this is going to be my final word on the issue until this arises again:

The Secretary of Federal Elections is a position whose job it is to manage elections. If he fails in that capacity, he is forced to resign, or he is impeached.

The Governor is elected to lead the region. If he fails to open the booth, he may face no consequences. Indeed, if a Governor is perfect in almost every respect, but fails to open amendment booths, I still might vote for him. Why? Because his job is to govern, of which only a small part is running federal amendment elections. As a regional voter, my job isn't to find the Governor who will best run federal amendment booths. My job is to find the best Governor for my region, and he may be the worst Governor at federal amendment booths, but I don't care, as long as he can save the region.

As such, and this is supremely important, there will be variance in the ability of the governors to perform this task. This is simple statistics and sociology; if you are selecting someone on some basis, then their performance in another basis will behave like the population as a whole, not like an expert in his field. And we want experts in the election-running field running elections, because we can inherently create a sample of people who have been vetted for their abilities to run elections.