spoon-business: RFJ 21

[Joel Uckelman <uckelman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

In the matter:

Any post sent after an nweek's voting commences which purports to recognise 
changes does not alter any Ballot Issues.

I rule TRUE.

The Ballot is constituted of Ballot Issues which are determined by the game 
state at the start of voting (R202/0). Obviously, any revisions of 
Proposals that are Ballot Issues would necessarily occur after they became 
Ballot Issues; thus the revisions would not be reflected on the Ballot, nor 
does the Rule concerning Ballot Issues provide for Proposals to become 
Ballot Issues at any other time.

If we take "Proposals then active" in R202/0 to mean "the active Proposals 
themselves" instead of "the then-current revisions of active Proposals", 
this statement could plausibly be ruled false, since the Proposals 
themselves could be ballot issues without respect to their revisions. 
However, this makes little sense given our tradition, albeit short, of 
distinguishing between individual Proposal revisions, and Proposals, which 
are collections of revisions, and could not sensibly be taken as objects of 
voting. Furthermore, when we type "Proposal" we generally mean to refer to 
a particular revision rather than the whole collection.

These two lines taken together lead me to believe the statement should be 
ruled true. A true ruling on this statement, however, means that P311/1, 
P312/1, P314/1, and P315/1 should not have appeared on the ballot; instead, 
their original versions were the actual Ballot Issues, and the Ballot 
failed to accurately reflect this.

It would appear that RFJ 24 addresses the interpretation of the voting on 
these; however, its wording seems to exclude just the cases in question. "A 
revision of an item which has not become a Ballot Issue" is not an object 
the status of which is in question--if it isn't a Ballot Issue at all, of 
course we wouldn't consider counting votes on it. The important case, "a 
revision of an item made since the item became a Ballot Issue" are excluded.

Since some sort of decision needs be made, and this Judgment supports their 
being a disparity between the actual Ballot and the Ballot as it should 
have been, I issue the following Judicial Order, directed to the 
Administrator:

Votes cast for P311/1, P312/1, P314/1, and P315/1 are not to be applied to 
the unrevised versions actually under consideration during the last voting 
period.

In effect, this means there was no quorum on these votes, and the Proposals are pushed, active, to this nweek, with no point changes, etc. Hopefully this corrects the problem with as little disruption as possible.

-- 
J.

--
Play Nomic!
http://www.nomic.net