- Rewriting the "Consolidated" Criminal Justice Act.
Man, while browsing the Wiki earlier, I took a peek at the not-so-
Consolidated Criminal Justice Act. I always knew it needed further consolidation, but it's been amended more times than I remembered.
This shouldn't be surprising, when you think about it. This Act was originally written in September of 2006, so anything that's nearly 5 years old in Atlasia, as a general rule, probably needs revisions. Here's all the revisions, to my knowledge, that have been made to it:
Of course what this all means is that the damn thing is patchier than a years-old Raggedy Ann doll. (And this isn't just reserved for the Consolidated Criminal Justice Act, either. The
Consolidated Electoral System Reform Act, also originally passed in 2006, suffers from much of the same problems. Arguably, it's worse, being far more important to rely on and being amended more often.) As Senator, I promise to personally rewrite the Consolidated Criminal Justice Act, primarily to make it
actually consolidated. In time, the Consolidated Electoral System Reform Act will also need work. I believe these are things that we can all agree on needing work, and have been in need of work for a very long time now.
- Deregistration that can work, or a Do-Not-PM List that actually has teeth. Take your pick.
Allowing citizens the options of voter deregistration is something I've supported for awhile now. A few months back, under President Fritz's Administration, I vocally supported
then-Senator Lief's legislation to carefully handle the issues surrounding deregistration. It was a pretty good all-around piece of legislation that handled the potential loopholes of deregistration pretty well, I thought, and finally allowed deregistration to those of us who had just completely lost interest in Atlasia and didn't want to be attached to it anymore in any way.
But then it was vetoed for.. some reason. Even re-reading the topic I can't entirely understand why. The potential legal loopholes were handled as well as they could be and it was actually a very sensibly put together bill, all things considered, but it was vetoed because of concerns that it might make the Registrar General's job too difficult, apparently.
Personally I don't see how it creates that much work for the RG at all, and if elected I will propose a similar deregistration law. I see no harm in allowing the option, nor do I see how it could be a legal nightmare, if the legislation is simply well put together beforehand.
After the failure to get deregistration procedure into law, however,
people moved to proposing a Do Not PM List to at least protect those still on the voter rolls that didn't wish to get reminders to vote. The strange thing about this proposal though, is that it doesn't really do anything at all.
The Senate created a law.. that has no punishment for disobeying it. It's essentially a "stern suggestion." I remember arguing against this as an outside observer in the Senate at the time:
This current bill lacks any point unless you put some force into it. As in "if anyone on the do-not-PM list receives a PM with the intent to sway the individual to vote or vote for a specific candidate, the sender shall be banned from voting in said election" or something. Otherwise this is just make-work that has no teeth.
That went, of course, completely ignored. Certain people either want out of Atlasia, or don't want to be bothered. That's all perfectly understandable, to be honest, but the problem is we managed to ignore the best option, and then move to the second-best option, and proceeded to make it as useless as possible.
I'm not entirely sure why people don't want to just step up and take care of this issue and move on, but if elected your Senator, I would do my best to try. There are two simple solutions to this problem, we just have to actually implement one of them and stop beating around the bush.
