Electoral Reform Amendment/Statute

[Jake]

Go with the trusty pick-a-number-between-one-and-ten method. Have the president pick a number and tell the SoFA and the Chief Jusitce. Then tell the tied candidates to pick a number.  Best way.

[Jake]

---ties in previous rounds will be handled first by preferences, then if still tied with a runoff between the two tied candidates, then if still tied with a random number game [note: what if the candidates tie the random number game? do we just keep playing the random number game until someone wins?]

Uh, I think the random number game was a joke.  Or was it?  I thought it was.

I was serious about the random number game. The coin toss would be hard to do fairly.

[Jake]

How about we allow them to delete their vote and vote again?  We really should make everyone preference every candidate, but it wouldn't be fair to disenfranchise everyone who screwed that up.

I will refuse to preference every candidate and will only preference the candidates I feel will be able to serve in a fitting manner. Not everyone approves of every candidate.

Case in point, the last election, I approved of PB, badnarik, Hugh, and Nation.  I didn't feel Harry and Al were fit to be president.  So I didn't preference them.

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I don't think the Senate should handle a tie, use a random fair system to determine a winner.

[Jake]

The importance of party support needs to be strengthened somehow.  Given the natiure of early Atlasian votes such as those quoted by Nym90 below:

It's interesting that in the first election last February, these were all considered valid votes:

I vote for the GOP ticket!

I vote for the GOP ticket.

Is this how one votes? Just post? Obviously I vote GOP.

Perhaps we could add something to allow for a party-line ticket and instead of having being just a single P/VP slate, it would be a complete list of preferences.  Of course people could still come up with individualized ballots, but it would give a discernable advantage to being an orgaized party, if it was simpler to vote a party list of preferences than an individual ballot.

That certainly won't gain much support from third partiers that are already trying to make the big parties change their names.

[Jake]

I agree with you, actually, and I would venture to say that the last election definitely showed that this is a problem...

Yes, that is sort of what I was talking about, although it's not quite as bad as voting "GOP" without even having a clue who the candidate is.  I'm not sure how one would remedy the problem in the last election; most solutions I can think of would get into very dangerous "father knows best" territory.  You could do King's suggestion of not allowing candidates to run as a member of a party, but they'll still have the backing of their respective parties, so it wouldn't change much.

I think that now is not really the time to address this topic, as it's controversial and could threaten to torpedo this whole thing if people didn't like it.

How about non-partisan ballots.  Just list the candidates.  And all candidates for political office must display no avatar for the period of voting.

[Jake]

I agree with you, actually, and I would venture to say that the last election definitely showed that this is a problem...

True, although less blatently. You had some people do the "right thing" such as Defarge and Julien, for example.

A few lights in the murky sea of the election...

It was a little bit harder to be partisan in D4, although I will say that every bloody red avatar in D4 voted for Harry. ;-P

Stick your grievences to D1. And keep in mind True Democrat turned out to be a good Senator. I understand the Super/Bulldog race, but TD did a good job, even if he didn't have Andrew's credentials.

True Democrat was good, but I haven't seen Bulldog around since.

[Jake]

Splitting terms is a terrible idea.  What senator serves the first half and which serves the second half.  It wouldn't happen in a real government and it is not at all good for Atlasia. 

The only way to settle an unbreakable tie is some sort of random contest. A coin toss is not plausible, but the random number game is a perfectly random way to decide the election.

I agree a runoff should be held before the random # game is done.