Peter
Junior Chimp
Posts: 6,030
Political Matrix
E: -0.77, S: -7.48
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« on: December 05, 2006, 01:18:42 PM » |
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I'd like to give a bit of background to the clause if I may, and importantly, why it was necessary in the older Republic.
When Atlasia was first founded, the federal census (and thus the districts) were based off the map of registered voters (this is how the districts were originally drawn before we even had a Constitution). When the first Constitution was drafted this scheme was maintained - it was soon realised that allowing voters to remain on the rolls indefinitely could chaos what were effectively rotten boroughs.
Imagine if a particular state or two were inundated with registrations and then most of those registrees went dead - this would leave an area with such a large population that it would cause a very small district centred around it. However, there would be so few active voters that it would either cause unchallenged elections, the movement of only a few people radically changing the actual political shape of a district, or worse still, somebody to get elected by stuffing the ballot box. Those of us who were around in those days remember only too well the December 2004 problems in New York and Pennsylvania that caused those elections to be utterly mired in controversy, and know only too well that it can happen here.
Faced with this problem, the founding fathers of the first Constitution decided in their wisdom to force all long term inactive voters (i.e. those not voting in 4 months) to be automatically purged from the rolls, thus allowing balanced, active districts to come out of redistricting.
When it came to the drafting of the second constitution, it was decided that the census should operate on the basis of those who voted at the last election. With hindsight, this would have been a much better solution to the original problem, but alas that is hindsight.
The provisions of Article V under discussion here were however not removed. The justifications for keeping it came down to a few arguments in my opinion:
*Retaining deadwood on the electoral roll is not healthy - it encourages candidates to bring everybody on the roll out to vote (legally active or not), who then don't hang around to suffer the consequences.
*It doesn't give a true picture of Atlasia - to date we have probably had several hundred, if not bordering on a thousand, registered voters. If these were all still on the rolls it might lead some to claim that Atlasia is fine when of course it isn't.
*If applied rectroactively, removing the provisions has many problems - records are far from complete and the original registration thread was deleted.
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