Activity Requirements
I fundamentally disagree with defining ‘active’ citizenship so broadly that the activity can have nothing to do with what citizenship entails. People who want to be involved in elections should be involved in elections. People who want to be involved in legislating should be involved in legislating. You can call someone an ‘active’ citizen because they posted anything recently (which, by the way, I can automate to keep citizenship forever…) but if citizenship comes with the right to vote, and a citizen is not voting, they’re not actually actively being a citizen.
To the point of ‘forcing’ people to vote in order to legislate — I believe that the Assembly’s role is not just to pass laws but also to exercise robust and vigorous oversight of government institutions including the executive and the Delegacy. I find it strange to say that legislators can effectively do that if they don’t care who leads the executive and who is the Delegate.
What CitComm Catches
I think it’s a bit unfair to only list confirmed (or at least judicially reviewed) cases. I wasn’t clear about this, but the examples I was referring to — someone applying without listing their previous account as an alias, and two applications within a few hours from the same school district — are situations that have happened while I’ve been in CitComm (so relatively recently) and nothing ever came of them because the applicants never responded to us.
It’s entirely plausible to argue that this is an acceptable risk and that we don’t even know if these applicants actually had bad intentions — indeterminate cases are infrequent enough that the risk can reasonably be accepted, but I think they occur with enough regularity that it isn’t entirely fair to only point to confirmed cases
Who Processes Applications
I’m aware of that history, Roavin. I don’t think the Chair is actually an apolitical position de jure, and the fact that recent chairs have taken an more apolitical approach does not preclude future chairs from seeking the office on a platform of utilizing it as a bully pulpit to drive a legislative vision.
If we feel BlockBuster and Welly do well in an administrative kind of role, that’s a testament to their abilities, not an argument as to why the Chair is the best office to assign these responsibilities to.
Responding to Security Threats
I agree that our current system for responding to something by like voter importation isn’t great. It’s not an argument that CitComm does it better — I just think that, if we’re discussing how citizenship suspensions might work, we might as well try to provide a security improvement over the current system instead of just throwing our hands up and saying, ‘well it kind of sucks currently too.’
Actually, CitComm does it worse than LegComm ever did. Unlike what happened with the Lavoret/Griffindor or the PodracingFan/Bowzin situations, CitComm can’t legally do anything once an application is accepted.
Court Injunctions for Citizenship Suspensions
Roavin, I think that’s a reasonable argument about why there isn’t actual impropriety. I still think it creates some appearance of impropriety. Justices are recused from appeals to their own decisions for good reason. Arguably it’s really not different from finding probable cause in a criminal case, for instance, but we’d still be putting justices in the position of ruling in camera with arguments from only one side.
I actually think that going the same route as with proscriptions — allowing legal challenges after one is issued rather than requiring an in camera injunction beforehand — provides stronger protections in several key respects. It ensures that the actions of our security institutions are public. It ensures any member of the public can submits thoughts or request recusals. It protects our judicial processes designed for ample opportunity for public input and briefing.
And the end result can be pretty much the same, except that no part of court proceedings are obscured from public view. The Court can always declare a suspension void ab initio if its finds as such.
Security Checks
I’m wary of banking on automation too much here, especially since it’s automation that relies on moderator/admin access and thus dependent on OOC bodies that would be expected to be responsive to political concerns. It’s not something that the community can reliably pick up because they simply don’t have access.
I also don’t think the automation is as simple as scanning for duplicate IPs. Both the examples I used — someone applying without listing their previous account as an alias, and two applications within a few hours from the same school district — did not have duplicate IPs.
I also find it strange that we would be trying to assign work to the admin team (which I think is also not really how the IC/OOC divide works) and also making an assumption about maintaining a particular tool to make those checks feasible. Would we actually adopt legislation that says the admin team should check for duplicate IPs once a month? What would we even do if they get busy or the tool doesn’t work? Otherwise, it’s nice to have but I think isn’t realistic to consider as part of the merits of this proposal.
Okay, that probably sounded overly negative. I’m just trying to be constructive here because I really do want to find a way this would work, and work well. Problems like CitComm burnout and slow application processing times are real and they hurt! I think the fact I’m getting caught up on things like “do we need to combine citizenship/legislatorship in this proposal” or “does going to the Court first make sense” is a good thing, as opposed to “why are you doing this wtf.”
