Item 2: Election Reforms

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With Stellar's motion, it has allowed the Council to vote on two aspects of Election Reform.

Tentatively, the votes would be as follows (details to be worked out, so please weigh in on that):

ER 1: A choice between lowering ad fees to some amount, or establishing a rank minimum requirement for a candidate(choice between the two).

ER 2: Choosing from three lowered amounts for candidate registration. A referendum will be done before the vote, where all pilots will have the same three choices as the Councilors.

The above is just one idea as to how to approach election reform. The floor is completely open to other councilors to present their ideas.

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Rank requirement would be a good safeguard but as has been pointing out it is far less necessary as the other reforms. I would like to see the GNN Ads at 200k each, in later votes I would want them capped at two per candidate.

As for registration fees I would like to see it lowered from 1.25M to 600K in order to require some dedicated credit grinding from a player but be easily reachable. This would mean the maximum a player could spend on a campaign would be 1M, which would level the playing field considerably. Currently candidates could spend 3M + if they wanted to saturate the GNN.

I ran only a single GNN article during the election and obtained the popular vote. This means a successful campaign could be run for a total of 800K. I do think without running any GNN Ad that my message would have reached far less casual players and had a large effect. They should not be mandatory, as some have expressed concerns over, but we must ensure we look at the total package cost even when making seperate votes on it.

In my crunching of the numbers, I consider the term length irrelevant.

Registration fees should not reflect varying length of term. Likely the terms will be longer than the first one but I see no reason to adjust the fees higher to compensate. You are not buying time in the Council, merely paying for the opportunity to serve.

On the topic of setting the term length, I believe this is something we should discuss at the end of the term. It should be gauged on the progress we put in and factor in if more time would likely make a more effective government that did not have to tackle the initial reforms. And of course the amount of daily/weekly time required to be an effective Councilor should be considered so that if it turns out to be demanding throughout the term then no future Councilor ends up having to minimize real life activities for four months.

We are now moving foward to a vote Friday on two choices for reducing the GNN Ad prices:

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Ok, great, what are some advert fee proposals?

Right now I've got a rough draft for the vote as follows:

Please choose to lower candidate advertisement price to one of the following:
300,000 credits
200,000 credits

Those were the two amounts that came up the most often. Any objections or other amount suggestions?

The vote passed with unanimous support for 200K fee per GNN ad.