SB 28-23: Increasing Requirements Act (Passed)

[YE]

some level of persuasion is still necessary to win elections.

When was the last time before this election which persuasion was needed to win elections, the only example in my head was last August, and before that was probably June 2019. There are only like 5 swing voters in the game, and with a game with over 200 voters, their votes don't amount for much.

Edit: Zombie voting also has an impact on reducing the impact persuasion, and unless we have a commission to purge zombies, persuasion will be more useless as time goes on.

You really want that HAEV?

At the very least a commission to remove discord zombies from all parties ideally.

How will all parties on the commission even know who is and isn’t a Discord voter considering many Discord Atlas servers are basically invite only cliques?

I guess by people who look like they do enough posts to get valid on a single day.

Not all Discord voters validity post or even come close to needing to do so.

Not all validity posters come from Discord.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

some level of persuasion is still necessary to win elections.

When was the last time before this election which persuasion was needed to win elections, the only example in my head was last August, and before that was probably June 2019. There are only like 5 swing voters in the game, and with a game with over 200 voters, their votes don't amount for much.

Edit: Zombie voting also has an impact on reducing the impact persuasion, and unless we have a commission to purge zombies, persuasion will be more useless as time goes on.

You really want that HAEV?

At the very least a commission to remove discord zombies from all parties ideally.

How will all parties on the commission even know who is and isn’t a Discord voter considering many Discord Atlas servers are basically invite only cliques?

I guess by people who look like they do enough posts to get valid on a single day.

Not all Discord voters validity post or even close.

Not all validity posters come from Discord.

I know of some who are PM only/aren't on discord.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The amendment is now at vote, Senators please vote Aye, Nay or Abstain.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

AYE

[Senator-elect Spark]

AYE on the amendment. When acknowledged, I also move to co-sponsor this legislation.

[Pericles]

Nay

[SevenEleven]

Nay.

[Blair]

Nay

[Left Wing]

Nay

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Vote on the Amendment s29:07:

Aye (2): NC Yankee and Spark498
Nay (4): Blair, Falterin, Pericles and SevenEleven
Abstain (0):

Didn't Vote (0):

This amendment has been rejected.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I motion for a final vote, Senators have 24 hours to object.

Senators have 24 hours to object to Spark becoming co-sponsor.

[Dr. MB]

Disappointing but not unexpected. As the bill stands it's a little crazy to put it lightly.

[Blair]

I motion for a final vote, Senators have 24 hours to object.

Senators have 24 hours to object to Spark becoming co-sponsor.

With no objections to this we move to a final vote

[Left Wing]

Aye

[Pericles]

Aye

[Senator-elect Spark]

Aye

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Abstain

I am fine with the rest of the bill but I am not comfortable with a number above 30.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Somewhere along the way, we kind of forgot this was a Scott/Falterin VP/Deputy PoC slot.

[Blair]

aye

[SevenEleven]

Aye.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

24 hrs to change votes

[Dr. MB]

Very disappointing!

[Former President tack50]

Regarding Ishan's complaint of validity posting, one of my longest running ideas on that front is to force posts counting towards validity to be done in 2 separate months (so for example for these April midterms you'd need to have at least 1-2 posts in March and 1-2 posts in April out of your 8 validity posts)

That would instantly kill any sort of validity posting (and if it doesn't it could get even more stringent, like requiring 1 post every fortnight on the 2 months before an election) at the cost of making things harder to track for Peebs.

Basically it would require people not just to post 8 posts, but also to post them in a consistent basis, not all at once.

But like YE and Yankee said, not all validity posters come from Discord and not all posters form Discord need validity.

Short of raising activity requirements to something truly insane which I don't think many would support (like say, 25 posts over the past 2 months, with at least 5 of those posts split on a separate month) I don't think there is any way to fight off those cliques.

My issue with those voters (which Ishan probably shares) is that they don't really care about Atlas and just come to support their friends. You have to draw the line of "caring enough about Atlas to be allowed to vote" somewhere but it a line that is very hard (if not impossible) to draw.

Another issue is that they are literally impossible to convince or campaign for their vote unless you happen to be in their clique since they won't read Atlas PMs at all. At least with "Random forum Fed Zombie" you can hope that they'll flip after reading a campaign PM but that is not the case with someone in a clique. This certainly goes against the spirit of what Atlasian elections should be; though elections moving from persuation to turnout has happened over a very long period of time that definitely predates the rise of Discord in 2017-18.

Either way probably something for another bill or a constitutional amendment, especially given how activity requirements are set in the constitution and not legislation?

In my view, registration requirements would tackle the problem of offsite voters while activity requirements would be the ones to tackle zombie voters (including but not limited to those on Discord cliques).

[Left Wing]

This passes the senate 5-0-1-0

Aye: FalterinArc, Pericles, Spark, Blair, SevenEleven
Nay:
Abstain: Yankee
Didn’t Vote:

[Left Wing]

Increasing Requirements Act

Section 3, Part 8, of the Census Act of 2019 is amended as follows

Section 3. Registration
8.In order to be eligible to register, a poster’s Atlas Forum account must have been registered for at least one hundred and sixty-eight hours and must have accumulated at least forty posts.

2. Nothing in the above change shall be construed as permitting the census administrator to remove the registrations of any voter who has already been registered due to not meeting these requirements.

3. Upon passage of this amendment, a new page entitled "Census Act" shall be created on the wiki. It shall contain the most up to date text, with amendments, of the Census Act as active in law. The page for "Census Act of 2019" shall continue to contain the original text. Both pages shall contain disclaimers at the top of the page explaining this and linking to the other page.

With a vote tally of 5-3-0-1, this bill passes the House.
X SevenEleven

People's Regional Senate
Passed 5-0-1-0 in the Atlasian Senate assembled,