Our newly ratified Article 12, ¶2 states that a Charter Amendment Committee must be formed if the quorum calculated from a moving average falls below 20%.
Our quorum percentage based on the last seven ratification votes is 17.47%.
Our committee is still, technically, in session, so I think that we should acknowledge this issue and state for the record that a review of the quorum is being postponed until a later time.
Rather than leave the issue completely open-ended, I would suggest formally that we not convene a Charter Amendment Committee to review this issue until two further conditions are fulfilled:
(1) Our first Mayor has been elected and inaugurated (September 22) and can serve on the committee as required.
(2) Additional Binding Votes or Ratification Votes have been held so that we can see whether the quorum percentage rises after the wave of new registries that accompanied our opening has passed. All those people appear as active during the past 60 days because they keyed in their registration during the past 60 days, but if they do not continue to visit then the 60-day active number will fall again and the quorum percentage will rise. It will be approximately mid-September before the numbers are able to fall as a result of that particular group of registrants deciding whether to remain active or not.
Thus, my proposal in the Poll above that we make a formal committee decision to:
Accept the results of the existing quorum method until the end of this calendar year, and only revisit the issue if the quorum percentage is not rising by then.
How quickly the quorum perentage moves depends of course on how many votes are actually held. But we are expecting at least three votes between now and then (revote on thread dreadful, a ToE Amendment, and the Mayoral election), and there will probably be some other charter issues taken up in November as a result of Voronwe’s thread in the Business Room where future issues are being collected.
**** Two Comments for Posterity:
During committee discussion and member discussion of the quorum, two issues emerged that were borderline controversial and their resolution has to do with the way one views the quorum mathematically.
Those issues were left somewhat dangling, and I would like to post here the mathematical explanation because ... because I would like to avoid a re-discussion of those issue both now and for the sake of the Amendment Committee that might reconsider the quorum in the future.
1. Faramond’s objection to extending a vote for seven days if a quorum is not reached was based on his analysis that someone might defeat a measure by voting for it during those seven days, simply by being the voter who fulfills the quorum.
While ‘strategic voting’ may be a concern from a civics point of view, it is wholly independent of the length of time for which a vote remains open. All voters, both for and against, contribute to the fulfillment of the quorum so a voter casting a ‘yes’ vote can end up defeating a measure whether they are voting on the 10th day or on the 17th. Similarly, a voter casting a ‘no’ vote can cause the measure to pass.
A person who wishes to vote yes can never benefit by withholding their vote since a measure will be defeated if (a) the quorum is not reached, or (b) the quorum is reached and the ‘no’ votes prevail.
The only people who can benefit by withholding their vote are those who would vote ‘no.’ The extension of the voting period makes it less likely, not more likely, that this particular strategy - not voting at all - will succeed and actually encourages those who oppose the measure to vote transparently.
2. Idylle questioned whether the use of ‘visits’ instead of ‘posts’ in compiling the 60-day active list affects the quorum. It does not.
When we calculate the percentage who voted during each of the last seven votes, the 60-day active number is in the denominator. When that number is large (visits > posts), it causes the percentage to be smaller. The percentage is then multiplied by the 60-day active list at the time of the current vote. The 60-day active number is now in the numerator, so that the smaller percentage is being multiplied by, again, the larger of two possible numbers (visits > posts).
Because this same measure appears in both the denominator and the numerator, differences of absolute magnitude between this measure and any other measure are cancelled out.
We do not get the same quorum number using visits as we would get using posts, because visits and posts are not perfectly correlated to one another, but there is no systematic difference of magnitude between the two results.
I did run a computer simulation using fictional, uncorrelated data for ‘visits’ versus ‘posts’, and confirmed that the quorum number derived from these two measures varied by only one vote.
*** End of Comments
This Poll will remain open for seven days or until a simple majority of eight people has decided the issue one way or another. I no longer remember exactly who's on this committee and don't know if they continue to watch the Jury Room.
edited for spelling: my spellchecker did not catch 'immerged' - is that weird or what?