Belschaft:
Or we could just eliminate the damn quorum requirement entirely.
I was in a region once where we spent six months unable to pass any laws as we couldn't muster the number of votes to remove our own quorum requirement.
Myroria:
Bel brings up a good point. In a region with slowing activity, a quorum requirement can cripple the legislature and prevent it from doing anything at all, slowing activity further.
But this can't actually happen unless we radically change how quorum works in a bad way. Because it's calculated as a percentage of legislatively active citizens, where legislative activity means
voting, a particular bill can only fail to achieve it so many times before it succeeds.
The reason we hit a quorum issue this time is because we hadn't voted on anything for a month, and so there was no weeding out of new citizens from legislative activity going on that normally happens when we vote regularly.[note]
To be strictly precise, the reason is a combination of the rate of citizens joining compared to the rate that are leaving or becoming marked as legislatively inactive, as well as the rate at which we are voting. Citizens are currently joining at a rate of one or two per day; if that were to slow to a crawl we would also not have quorum problems. Inversely, if citizenship applications massively sped up, no rate of RA voting (particularly given our 2-vote maximum) could meet quorum. But citizenship rates have been relatively stable at that level for a few months now, and IMO it's reasonable to look at them as a constant in this equation.[/note] One way to avoid this is always make sure we're voting on things in the RA (because TNP doesn't have enough of a legislative fetish already
), but the draft that COE wrote will fix this by preventing new citizens who have never voted from being counted as legislatively active. If we implement it, we shouldn't run into a quorum problem again.
I can't support a hard minimum, for exactly the reasons that have been mentioned - it's inflexible and exactly the bad direction that would cause us to be permanently unable to meet quorum in times of relative quiet. Similarly, a hard maximum I think has similar issues to not having quorum at all. Currently we have something like 150 citizens, with 40-50 regularly voting in the RA and another ten or twenty voting sometimes. At this size, a hard cap of 30 might be fine. But if we continue to grow at the rate we have been since we expanded citizenship, and we reached, say, 300 citizens with 100 regularly voting citizens and another couple dozen voting regularly, 30 would be quite low and would allow for a small group to push something through when people aren't paying attention.
I don't think expanding to that size is particularly likely, but that's no reason to legislate ourselves out of accommodating it.
