New Unicameral-Subregional Plan Proposal

[Sestak]

Hello Atlasia,

I come to you tonight after some weeks' worth of discussion with Speaker MB, PPT Yankee, Governor LouisvilleThunder and others on a plan to make Atlasia more active, more engaging, and more colorful than it currently is on both the legislative and electoral level. After discussion, I am very pleased to, along with the three of them, present this plan to you today.


Main points of the plan

- Congress shall be consolidated into a single, unicameral Senate consisting of 18 members.
- 9 of the 18 senators shall serve at-large, elected for a term of 2 months, as the current House does.
- 9 of the 18 senators shall serve at regional levels, elected for a term of 4 months

• 3 regional senators, elected at the presidential cycle
• The other 6 senators, elected at the midterms, will be elected from subregions; with 2 subregions being contained in each region.

- Any regional or subregional election will require a voter have not been registered in any other (sub)region for 6/8 weeks.
- Other than this above restriction, regions must allow all federally eligible voters to vote in their regional elections.
- Subregional elections, in turn, must operate on regional election law (with the additional subregion-move requirement, as above).
- The subregions will be drawn in the following configuration:



We firmly believe this plan can help ameliorate some of the main problems plaguing Atlasia today: The unicameralism of the Senate will allow every member of it to participate on an equal footing, which in turn allows members to more easily introduce bills knowing they should have a chance at passage. The introduction of subregional seats, on the other hand, will allow more small-electorate races in which more players have opportunities to run for congress and makes competitive races more likely to occur.

We are eager to hear all of your thoughts; please share your support or any questions or concerns in this thread.

Sincerely,
President Sestak
Speaker MB
President Pro Tempore NC Yankee
Southern Governor LouisvilleThunder

[Sestak]

Just a phenomenal plan. Really impressive how you guys balanced so many interests to make something that everyone can get behind. Hope you can get this done soon.

Are you planning on introducing an Amendment in Congress or doing this via convention?

The plan was through Congress, once the public consultation phase is complete.

[Sestak]

Exciting stuff! That I would be glad to support!

Mildly concerned about the weird Southern division but if that's what y'all think is best...

Idk I feel like the weirder one is Fremont, does that actually evenly split the region's in-game population?

On the current census it comes out to 32 in the Pacific and 35 in the Mountain west. Mostly skewed by the fact that 20 are in CA (and a further 7 in WA).

[Sestak]

I guess the way to get around this would simply be for (most) zombie voters to just vote in each sub-regional race and the invalid votes for candidates outside their sub-region are then discarded.

Late in responding to this, but this was my thought as well - with the subregional elections in the regional booth, arguably the most common 'mishap' would simply be voters who have become used to filling out every race on the ballot continuing to do so - which ultimately isn't really that big a deal; mostly just an inconvenience for voting booth administrators. Hopefully also won't be a behavior we see for too long, as voters should catch on after a couple of cycles at most.

[Sestak]

Whilst I am not opposed to the conceptual framework of unicameralism or even subregionalism, I fully reject the creation of parallel classes of members with different term lengths within the same body.
I could see myself supporting this if the tenure of the at-large Senators were raised in length to four months.

I also find the concept of Senators having different term lengths depending on constituency strange.

I support it but I think the term timing should be uniform, not going back and forth from two to four months, it's gonna get confusing for new users under that type of schedule.

So this is one of the detail points (other than the general concern about the legislature size) that seems to have drawn the most comments/critiques. This is a point that I think has reasonable arguments in either direction, and the four of us don't really have a super strong preference on it.

So I have opened a thread solely to debate and discuss this point - I'd like to get most of the viewpoints out on the table so we can see where the player base stands on this.

[Sestak]

so is this still on

ahem

[Sestak]

If the CMA is a legal statute under the old constitution then - since it allocates UK areas to regions- we can also legally extend it to subregions. The only question is can we do it unilaterally by statute - since none of the treaty is being fundamentally changed - or do we need UK/GM sign off as well.

My position is that the former should suffice; I am planning on introducing such a law along with other changes to the FEA and census act to bring those laws in line with the new constitution.