Electoral Reform: Another Round

Next up for the Senate is Senator Gabu's Electoral Reform Bill. Like recent forum affairs proposals (namely the secret ballot amendment and the forum affairs split), the Bill does not appear to have undergone much consultation. Either the Bill must undergo a lot of work in the coming days and weeks in the Senate, or it must reject the legislation, else it risks quite literally causing the sky to fall.

The full totality of the impact of the Bill would probably cause a good number of votes to be declared invalid (the Bill offers very little discretion to a voting booth administrator), and certainly many more than at present. One of the most poorly considered sections is Section 2:

To vote in an election, any eligible voter must make a copy of the ballot provided by the administrator, make some form of mark in one and only one of the spaces provided in clause 3 of section 1, and then post the completed ballot in the voting booth.

In a Presidential election with say the following tickets:
Porce/Q
John Ford/True Democrat
Ilikeverin/PBrunsel

The "usable ballot" described in §1, Clause 2 would look something like this:

[ ] - Porce/Q
[ ] - John Ford/True Democrat
[ ] - Ilikeverin/PBrunsel
[ ] - None of the Above
[ ] - Write-in: _____________________

A voter must then make one (and only one) mark in the spaces provided to the left. If the voter were to however cast a vote like this:

Ilikeverin/PBrunsel

The vote must be held as invalid by a simple construction of the Bill's operative clauses: When one says that the voter "must make a copy of the ballot provided", that leaves no discretion, and provides none for the administrator either. He would have to discount that vote. Given Atlasia's historic prevelance of voting in the second manner that I note above, the Bill presents a threat to a fair electoral process, potentially binding the SoFA to a ridiculous standard of counting votes.