I’ll have more comments later but just thinking through how this would work — what’s the point of “assigning” a CitComm member? It seems like a practical impediment. For example, if I request additional information from an applicant, but another CitComm member sees the applicant’s response before I do… what do we gain by making them wait for me (as the assigned member) to process that when they could do it themselves?
If the goal is to just have one CitComm member process each application… I don’t know that had to be codified so rigidly. I think wording like “at least one CitComm member processes each application” would suggest a different meaning than “CitComm [collectively] processes each application” already.
I’m open to alternative wording, but I am not sure that this is it. I agree that an “at least one” rule could be read to suggest that review by one CitComm member is the default, but it does not foreclose the possibility that CitComm could adopt an internal policy that more than one member must sign off on any approval or denial. I would prefer a clear legislative directive that each application should be reviewed and then approved or denied by precisely one CitComm member.
In any event, I’m not sure that the proposed language would cause the type of practical problems that you describe. Or at least it wasn’t meant to. It requires that each application be assigned to a CitComm member “for review,” which I intended to mean–for final determination of eligibility and grant / denial, not for preliminary proceedings like requests of more information. So in the hypo you laid you, I wouldn’t describe the application as having been “assigned” to the person who initially requested more information, but rather to the available CitComm member who reviewed the application once all information necessary to make an eligibility decision had been submitted.
Now, you might say that determining whether more information is needed itself requires “review,” so the application would need to be assigned to a CitComm member at that point. Fair enough. That suggests the problem is with the word “review.” Perhaps a change to something like “The Citizenship Committee shall assign each citizenship application to a member of the Citizenship Committee to determine the applicant’s eligibility for citizenship”? Or, if the word “assign” is a problem, maybe “A member of the Citizenship Committee shall review each citizenship application and determine the applicant’s eligibility for citizenship.”
A good point. That provision has actually been in the Citizenship Act for quite some time without clarifying that point. The concept of the appointment being “emergency” and its automatic expiration suggests that it is meant to be without Assembly approval. I will make that edit.
I also, upon reflection, prefer some of the language around single CitComm member review that I proposed in my reply to Pronoun. I’ll also implement those edits now.
I think this actually would not be a great experience for applicants.
Suppose an applicant has the same IP address as an existing citizen. Are they the same person trying to get a second vote with a second account? Maybe — but ideally, I’d like to request additional information to make a more informed decision. I cannot know whether I want to request more information without, at least in the plain meaning of the word, ‘reviewing’ the application. In this scenario, it would also be impossible to request additional information because requesting additional information is neither approving nor denying the application.
Is that the goal of the conspicuous ineligibility standard? I think that’s one way to read it — you cannot even investigate an application that is conspicuously dubious (for lack of a better term), you have to immediately accept it, even if further investigation would be likely to show conspicuous ineligibility. But I think that produces some pretty silly outcomes. For example, I don’t think you should be able to get more votes just by creating more accounts.
Thanks for the helpful thoughts. I made a few more changes to the proposal in response.
Changed the standard from “conspicuously ineligible” to “clearly ineligible” to emphasize that it is a standard of review, rather than a prohibition on necessary further investigation by the Citizenship Committee.
Clarified that any member of the Citizenship Committee can request additional information from applicants. In other words, such requests do not need to come from the entire Committee.
Clarified that the member reviewing and deciding upon an application can consider information gathered by other members of the Citizenship Committee as needed.