The Road Ahead: My View of the Elections

Because I couldn’t make it logically fit in at any point in the article that wasn’t miles down, here’s a link to the official election website which will hopefully be set up by tomorrow: http://vote.francisville.co.cc

I would also like to apologise for the lack of structure of this article – I sort of just wrote down whatever just popped into my mind, and I’m currently ill, so don’t expect a masterpiece of prose. It’s also very lengthy, so make sure you have time on your hands before you start reading.

With elections scheduled to take place from the 10th to the 15th of September (read: in exactly a week’s time), I thought it would be a good idea – since nobody else has done so – to take a little gander at the first elections of our young-but-old state.

First of all, I’d like to applaud Jamie Sutherland for his decision to postpone the elections. Upon input from myself and other Francillians, the elections were originally scheduled to take place from the 3rd to the 8th of September. However, these dates would have deprived many candidates of the chance to campaign to a level satisfactory to them, and thus impeded on the voters’ ability to inform themselves about the people they were going to elect. After further consultation with other Francillians on his proposal to postpone the elections by a week, widespread support allowed Jamie Sutherland to finalise the election dates to those mentioned above.

On the subject of campaigning, there is an interesting observation for the keen citizen to make: Campaigning so far is, mainly, focussed on the Federal Council. Why is this? Well, let’s have a look at other elections going on at the time: First off, and most importantly, we’re electing the Federal Chamber. There’s also cantonal elections going on in Wasserbrueck and Rudno – I’m not entirely sure about North Llabdey and New Scireland. This not-sure-ness is something we’ll return to later. But first, back to the point I just brought up: Why is campaigning concentrated on the Federal Council elections? Simple: In most of the cantonal elections, as well as the Federal Chamber election, the distribution of candidates per seat appears to be one, or, more simply put, there’s one person standing per available spot. An exception to this may well be Wasserbrueck in the Chamber, which has 2 seats but may have 3 candidates, though candidacies have not yet been formally confirmed. The point is, essentially: Most positions aren’t having elections, they’re having affirmations. Basically, Rudno has one seat, and one person is currently intending to stand for it – me. There’s no one else to elect, so there’s no possible way I’m not getting elected. Therefore, I don’t need to campaign, so I won’t.

However, people are very much, as previously mentioned, launching campaigns for the Federal Council. Currently, there appear to be 5 individuals candidating in the elections for Francisville’s first ever elected and joint head of state: Jamie Sutherland, James Puchowski,  Cameron Falby, Andrew Newton and of course yours truly. The appeal in standing for these elections is obvious: Depending on the extent to which Francisville flourishes and grows, and the time over which it continues to actively exist, the three people who first man the executive body of this Federal Republic will, so to speak, go down in history, in much the same way as – though, naturally, less prominently than – George Washington or Charles de Gaulle. This is an interesting aspect to look at: The “founding father” criterion. Much like with the United States, after the elections, there will already be multiple criteria by which people may wish to award the label of  “founding father”: The de facto ‘leaders’ of the individual cantons, which would include Jamie Sutherland, Cameron Falby, James Puchowski and again, yours truly; those individuals most involved in the development of the constitution, which would typically include Jamie Sutherland, yours truly, James Puchowski, Cameron Falby and Andrew Newton; the first members of the Federal Council or the first members of the Federal Chamber.

Of course, this is an immensely interesting topic (to myself at least): looking at future Francisville’s perspective of its past, and drawing analogies with various similar occurrences in history. However, as intriguing as it is, it isn’t the subject of this article. Hence, let’s move on. We’ve spoken about campaigns in general, but haven’t looked at any concretely. First of all, what types of campaigns can we see? Well, to my surprise, I am currently the only candidate to have a campaign of my own – as in, specifically for myself, not a party. No, I’m not some quirky independent – parties in Francisville are not involved in the political process. They are affiliations, social clubs, think tanks and what have you – they’re a lot of things, but they’re certainly not relevant to voting. Not only are parties never voted for, the party doesn’t even appear next to the candidate on the ballot paper.

However, some choose to use them as a campaign platform, such as James Puchowski, whose Social Democratic Alliance has this appealing and informative website set up: http://www.sda-frf.co.cc/. What I’m not quite sure about is what audience exactly they are trying to appeal by using Francillish. It seems fairly obvious to me that the population of North Llabdey, who constitute the only Francillish speakers in the country, will vote for James on their ballot paper. By which I mean, place him at 3rd place or above – we use the Scottish-rules single transferable vote electoral method, in case you didn’t know, which, among another problem I’ll discuss later, is one of the reasons the outcome of this election is so difficult to predict. Anyhow, to return to the point: I feel that, by using Francillish instead of a more federally used language like English or Francillian, the SDA may be putting most people off rather than attracting them, as it displays somewhat of a bias toward North Llabdey.

Since Jamie Sutherland and his party, the Libertarian Union, are currently still developing their campaign sites, I shall instead continue with my campaign so far. I began creating campaign material when I first truly realised that the constitutional convention would soon be over and elections would be held. This has me at somewhat of an advantage – I began thinking about and developing my campaign whilst I was still enjoying the blissful absence of obligations that come with summer holidays. Jamie has recently returned to Edinburgh in order to continue his studies, and James will soon likewise be faced with the situation of returning to academia, resulting in having to dedicate less time to their campaigns. I would imagine the same to be true of Cameron and Andrew.

Anyway, as promised, my campaign: Not only do I have a campaign website at http://linden2012.tumblr.com/, but I also have a video of admittedly low quality posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDCulQw8r0Q and a Facebook page (feel free to like it, *hint hint*) at http://www.facebook.com/LindenFedCouncil12. Personally, I hope that the Federal Council will consist of myself, Jamie and James. Why is that? Well, all of us have different areas of micronationalism we would especially like to focus on developing. Jamie is especially keen on furthering Francisville’s educational system and media landscape; James is aiming to develop Francisville’s culture and start cultural projects; whereas I am focusing on the technological and administrative side of things. Of course, we all enjoy dabbling in each other’s sectors as well – Jamie is certainly going to enjoy expanding our cuisine and other cultural landscape, and I’ll enjoy improving our media and authoring university courses as much as Jamie. But we all have areas we’re extremely good and talented at, and I feel if we have a Federal Council consisting of people with such diverse talents, we can really get the most out of Francisville.

In case you’re wondering what administrivia I will be focusing on,  here’s where at long last I mention a point I brought up earlier: The “not-sure-ness”, or, more eloquently put, the general unavailability of information. See, information flow in Francisville is quite chaotic. We use several venues, such as Skype, E-Mail, facebook etc. This isn’t a problem per se; the problem is that, after our discussions and exchanges and what have you, we don’t store ideas, facts, responses, results, exchanges, decisions and so forth in a central location. I will – regardless of whether I’m elected to the Federal Council or not – work towards setting up a type of intranet where we can just log in, quickly dump information we just found out about that may be relevant to others, set attributes and access criteria and boom, every citizen who should be able to see that information can see that information, and easily navigate to it and share it with others. It’s Open Government, e-Government, Government 2.0 – whatever you want to call it, bottom line is, it’s incredibly nifty and will make thinks far, far easier.

Now to cease my shameless self-promotion and pick up another point I mentioned earlier: The results for the Federal Council elections are very difficult to project. This is mainly due to three reasons:

Firstly, some candidates (namely myself and James Puchowski) are not very well known among the Francillian citizenry. However, the two of us are also, so far, the candidates who have been the most public and “in your face” about our campaigns, and in the seven remaining days until the election, I don’t think Cameron Falby, Andrew Newton or indeed Jamie Sutherland are going to be able to step up their game to a level comparable to that of James and myself. So, their advantage of being better known balances with our advantage of having stronger campaigns, making it extremely difficult to say for whom Francillians are going to be most likely to vote for.

Secondly, and here’s another thing I’ve already touched upon earlier, Francisville is a very unified country in terms of beliefs. We all have little things we don’t agree on, but on the larger issues, we all tend to agree. This is a good thing in general – the less time we spend arguing, the more time we spend doing awesome things. However, it makes things difficult for both the voters and the election analysts: The voters will have a hard time prioritising between what each of the candidates wish to focus on (or in some cases, not even know what the candidates wish to focus on in the first place), and the analysts will thus have an equally hard time guesstimating what the voters will end up deciding to prioritise.

Lastly, our electoral method. Yet another thing I’ve mentioned before, and here’s how it affects electoral projections: Even if you’ve managed to get accurate vote projections using opinion polls et al, counting votes for STV is ridiculously complicated. Believe me, I’ve tried, and constantly run into errors. That’s why you should really get a computer to do it. “But Seb!” you say, “You’re a programmer! Go figure something out!” Well, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Before the next election. Now before you look at me in an annoyed demeanor, I’m serious. I will create a program in PHP that will allow votes to be input both as projections or as actual votes which will then be counted using Scottish-rules STV. But doing that takes time – especially, for use in actual elections, allowing the system to require voters to log in using generated codes etc. However, and I promise this, it will be done in time to be used for the next elections both projectively and for the actual electoral process. But please bear in mind that I need to secure this system and document it meticulously in order to avert any possible accusations of rigging the system or so.

That’s it, I’m done with this article. It’s come up to 1991 words and taken me days to write, and yet it looks like an unstructured mess. Ah well, better than nothing, eh?