May it please the Court:
INTEREST OF AMICUS CURIAE
I respectfully submit this brief as an interested party in my capacities as a citizen and voter, contestant in the election dispute from which this case arises, and a legislator in the Assembly. I wish to emphasize that neither the filing of this brief nor the initiation of the election dispute stems from any personal preference for a candidate. Rather, I submit this brief out of a firm belief that the integrity of our electoral process must be taken seriously if we are to preserve our democracy, and because I respectfully contend that the Election Commissioner erred in placing Belschaft on the ballot.
SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT
The central question in this case is whether Belschaft satisfied the eligibility requirements set forth in § 2(3) of the Elections Act for inclusion on the ballot for the office of Prime Minister. If the answer is in the negative, as I submit it must be, then Belschaft ought not to have appeared on the ballot, and the Election Commissioner erred in permitting his inclusion. It is my position that Belschaft was ineligible under the Elections Act and this Court’s precedent in Legal Question on Candidate Eligibility, [1605.HQ] (2016), and should have been precluded from standing as a candidate. Consequently, any votes cast in his favor ought to be declared null, void, and of no legal effect.
ARGUMENT
This case presents the question of whether the Election Commissioner acted correctly in including Belschaft on the ballot for Prime Minister. For the reasons set forth below, I respectfully submit that he did not. Belschaft did not fulfill the eligibility requirements set forth in the Elections Act, and even if he did so belatedly, this Court’s decision in Legal Question on Candidate Eligibility makes clear that a candidate who fails to “complete the requirements for candidacy within the allotted time period” (citations omitted) must still be precluded.
1
§ 2(3) of the Elections Act provides that: To be eligible to be included on a ballot, a candidate must post a campaign in an area designated by the Election Commissioner. The campaign must prominently include a truthful declaration of all potential conflicts of interest the candidate may have within and outside of the South Pacific.
§ 4(1)(b) of the Elections Act provides that: The campaign and debate period will last four days, after which the citizens will vote for four days.
§ 3(4) of the Charter states that: No member may be denied the right to vote or hold office, unless prohibited by constitutional law or by the sentence imposed following a guilty verdict at a criminal trial. (emphasis added).
2
On April 15 of this year, the Election Commissioner published a thread entitled “April 2025 Prime Minister Election | Declarations,” which set forth the following instructions: "This is an election for Prime Minister of the South Pacific and Craziest Person of the South Pacific.
IMPORTANT - READ BEFORE DECLARING Failure to follow these instructions will render your candidacy invalid.
(…)
You must declare your candidacy as a response to this topic, and separately post a campaign within this category, no later than the following date: April 19, 2025 2:00 PM (UTC)
Your campaign must contain a complete and truthful disclosure of all your possible conflicts of interest within NationStates.
The Elections Act contains further information on the requirements for participation in this election." (citations omitted).
In that thread, Belschaft received two nominations for Craziest Person and one nomination for Prime Minister. On April 18, Belschaft made the following statement: “I accept the nominations of my loyal supporters/sycophants/minions. The purge shall soon begin.” However, Belschaft’s statement was not made as a reply to any of the nominations, creating ambiguity regarding whether he had accepted the nomination for Prime Minister or for Craziest Person. The Commissioner rightly sought clarification. Nevertheless, Belschaft did not respond until one hour and six minutes after the deadline for declaring candidacy and posting a campaign. Even then, his response was vague, simply stating: “all the offices,” without explicitly mentioning his intention to run for Prime Minister.
Belschaft adopted a similar approach in his campaign thread, titled “I Love Democracy, I Love the Coalition.” In his AI-generated opening post, Belschaft made no reference to his candidacy for Prime Minister. His conflict of interest statement read: “I have no other nations or citizenships other than Belschaft in TSP, but paranoid and histrionic individuals will be unlikely to believe that. I may or may not be an agent of one or more of the Chinese MSS, Cuban G2, True Korean RGB, Sudanese GIS, or Venezuelan SEBIN but that all seems highly improbable.”
Combined with the absence of any campaign tags indicating it was for Prime Minister, this led many voters to believe that the thread was, at best, a campaign for Craziest Person, or, at worst, a joke campaign. The first response to the thread, written by me, directly inquired whether it was intended as a campaign for Prime Minister or Craziest Person. However, Belschaft failed to provide any clarification. Instead, the thread devolved into a discussion of what ChatGPT would do, with Belschaft responding to various questions using the AI.
3
The statutory requirement for appearing on the ballot is clear. Pursuant to § 2(3) of the Elections Act, a candidate must post a campaign in an area designated by the Election Commissioner which must prominently include a truthful declaration of all potential conflicts of interest the candidate may have within and outside of the South Pacific.. Belschaft did neither. As demonstrated by the facts outlined above, Belschaft never posted a campaign for Prime Minister. In fact, at no point did he explicitly state that he was running for Prime Minister. Even when directly asked, in the first response to his thread, Belschaft refused to clarify whether the campaign was for Prime Minister or for Craziest Person.
The Election Commissioner argues that he was right to include Belschaft on the ballot because Belschaft noted in their declaration post that they were accepting their nominations, and that while he did ask Belschaft to clarify whether he was running for Prime Minister or Craziest Person, even had Belschaft not provided a response, “Belschaft ought to be included in the Prime Minister ballot given that they had accepted a nomination — i.e., declared the candidacy — for said office.” I disagree for several reasons.
First, it was not at all clear from reading the thread that Belschaft was accepting his nomination for Prime Minister. Belschaft had been nominated for Craziest Person more times than he had been nominated for Prime Minister, and his response that he accepted his nominations (note the wording in plural) was not made using the forum’s reply function. Furthermore, even if the Court were to find that it was clear from the context in the declarations thread, that still does not satisfy the requirements in § 2(3) of the Elections Act. The Commissioner contends that Belschaft accepted a nomination and thereby declared candidacy for the office of Prime Minister. However, the Elections Act is clear that a candidate must post a campaign. Simply accepting a nomination in the declarations thread is insufficient to satisfy the statutory requirement.
Furthermore, during the Assembly’s debate on the adoption of § 2(3) as an amendment to the Elections Act, legislator Roavin, who proposed the amendment, stated: “How about something like this: Candidates are required to post campaigns for elections they run in, and this campaign must prominently declare any potential conflicts of interest that they may have. That way, CoIs are required (rather than just “tradition”) and it’s right in the voter’s face as they make a decision, rather than in some other thread.” (emphasis added). Even if a textual interpretation of the Elections Act does not make it explicit that a candidate must state which election they are running in, the legislative intent clearly supports such a requirement. In this regard, I suggest that the Court adopt a reading based on legislative intent. It is not an unreasonable expectation that a candidate state which election they are running in.
It is also relevant to address Belschaft’s intentionally facetious conflict of interest statement, in which he claimed that he “may or may not be” affiliated with multiple foreign intelligence agencies. The Election Commissioner argues that Belschaft’s statement complied with the requirements set forth in § 2(3) of the Elections Act. However, I contend that by deliberately introducing ambiguity into his statement, it fails to meet the statutory requirement of being a “truthful declaration.” A purposive reading of the statute must conclude that a conflict of interest statement should be both truthful and serious, and not an avenue for facetious remarks or strategic ambiguity.
4
Election Commissioner argues that: " Members are guaranteed under Charter III(4) the right to vote and hold office. It follows then that citizens should be afforded all reasonable opportunities to vote for candidates who are otherwise eligible, and candidates should be afforded all reasonable opportunities to run for any office for which they are eligible. It would have been illogical to exclude Belschaft when by all rights they had declared their candidacy in response to a nomination and had complied with all other requirements set out in the Elections Act."
I disagree for several reasons. First, § 3(4) of the Charter states that no member may be denied the right to vote or hold office, unless prohibited by constitutional law, and the Elections Act is just that, constitutional law. Therefore, it follows that if a candidate fails to meet the eligibility requirements set forth in the Elections Act, they may be denied the right to hold office, in accordance with the plain language of the article. Second, it should not matter whether Belschaft would have otherwise been eligible to stand as a candidate. What matters is that he did not fulfill the eligibility requirements specified in the statute. As previously stated, it is not an onerous requirement to ask a candidate to explicitly state which election they are running in. Excluding Belschaft from the ballot would not disenfranchise any voter. If voters disagreed with any other candidate running, they could always choose to vote to re-open nominations.
5
Should the Court find that Belschaft did fulfill the Elections Act’s requirements for eligibility to be included on the ballot, based on his response of “all the offices” to the Election Commissioner’s request, the Court must still find his candidacy to be invalid under its precedent in Legal Question on Candidate Eligibility, [1605.HQ] (2016). That ruling, which addressed whether a candidate must possess citizenship at the time of their nomination for their candidacy to be valid, held, insofar as pertinent to this case, that "Should a potential candidate be unable to complete the requirements for candidacy within the allotted time period for any reason, including reasons of citizenship, their candidacy will not be valid. (emphasis added). While that case concerned an interpretation of the older Election Act, there has been no substantive change to the law that would render that holding abrogated. Therefore, the Court should adopt the holding in Legal Question on Candidate Eligibility in this case and find Belschaft’s inclusion on the ballot as a candidate for Prime Minister to be invalid.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, Belschaft’s inclusion on the ballot for the office of Prime Minister was not in accordance with the eligibility requirements outlined in § 2(3) of the Elections Act. For the reasons presented, Belschaft failed to meet these requirements, and the Election Commissioner erred in including him on the ballot. Even if the Commissioner found that Belschaft was eligible to be included following his clarification, his candidacy should still have been declared invalid under Legal Question on Candidate Eligibility, [1605.HQ] (2016), because he did not provide the clarification within the allotted time period. Therefore, I respectfully submit that the Court find in favor of disqualifying Belschaft’s candidacy and render any votes in his favor legally ineffective.
Respectfully submitted,
Luke, EC (ERSTAVIK)