Some polls

[Zukchiva]

Do you believe the current voter registration system to be unnecessarily burdensome and/or bureaucratic?

• Yes
• No

Should our citizenship-esque system require applicants to disclose a World Assembly nation (doesn’t have to be in TEP) to TEP authorities, and maintain WA membership with said nation?

• Yes
• No

Should we rename our citizenship system from Voter Registration back to traditional citizenship? (I.e. you agree that resident nations of TEP should be called “Residents”, and what we presently call Registered Voters will be called “Citizens”.)

• Yes
• No

Should we keep the current requirement for applicants to telegram TEP officials from their nations during the application process?

• Yes
• No

We keep having these discussions. I’m interested in seeing wherein Magisters’ (and interested Citizens’) opinions lie on most of these issues.

I’m not promising to make any drafts. But I feel this will help us understand a little more concretely wherein we lie, as a group of peeps, on this issue.

[Aurora_Yukihime]

Thank you for wanting to settle this conversation.

Here’s my overarching take - we speak about Outreach being important to admitting new people into our region, such that our Magister count can increase to a safer number, there’s the expected quantity of Executive Staffers about, and there’s plenty of Voters in our elections. At the same time we vote for measures seeking to make the region secure by requiring all applicants to fill out paperwork, be subject to review, make a PDF, and all kinds of well-meaning security apparati that basically make it where only the most patient or stubborn could ever make it to their position.

And who does that stop? We already know anyone truly dedicated to overthrowing our Confederation will gladly take the time to fill out a few or five applications if it means the prize will be theirs.

You can make a system so secure nobody can use it. I like to believe there’s a reason why I can still consider myself “in the newer batches” despite over two years of service - there’s hardly any new folk to speak of as they needed my patience to be legal to do anything. And Ademar forbid they enjoy participating in any other region.

The problem is our traditional value of security above all else. Good luck fixing that. I wish we would.

My ideal focus is instead letting people play the game. Have a few, and only a few - one’s already a LOT for a “game”, simple applications. Track only what’s necessary for security, especially if Praesidium boasts they know all such things suspicious Citizens won’t tell them anyway. If people enjoy participating with a foreign military or foreign region that shouldn’t disenfranchise them from Citizenship, including voting, in this region. This is radical as all hell. I wish it wasn’t. But through that maybe then it won’t be so bad Executive Outreach is lacking.

[Kingdom_of_Napels]

Apologies if this is incoherent. No doubt some will disagree, but I was asked to write down my thoughts and thus you shall suffer hearing about them. Keep in mind I’m fairly new to the region, so some of my takes on the original intent of the current system may be off.

I’m not certain ‘bureaucratic’ is the term I’d use. It is, however, counterintuitive, at least to my mind. I do not know why this change was implemented, and my best guesses come down to granting residents greater protection and/or to increase engagement. The former did not require an overhaul of the citizenship system and the latter does not seem to have been accomplished - if anything, elections are less engaging than they were previously from what I have seen.

In a bit of irony, the system is not necessarily all that different. You just changed the terms, granting automatic citizenship to any nation in TEP, abolishing the term “resident” and replacing the role of citizen with “registered voter”. There was no need for this, and to my mind, it’s poor for branding purposes. Previously, you could sell engaging off-site and voting in elections as the perks of citizenship - and in the process, you also differentiated between those on-site in the region and those who meaningfully wish to engage with its off-site community and its government. In other words, if you were drawn to participate in elections you’d implicitly be encouraged to participate in the government, and more importantly, vice versa.

Changing the terms to simply be “registered voter” removes this differentiation entirely, leaving you with a huge number of people masked as citizen with no way to know who is and isn’t willing to contribute. Additionally, it streamlines the joining process perhaps too well - you join, you’re masked as citizen and you’re told you’re good to participate in everything, you get access to all the important channels, etc. Previously, you needed to apply for citizenship (and that’s not such a huge ask) - but then you’d both be good to participate and vote while you’re at it. Perhaps I’m nostalgic or some such, but that makes a great deal more sense to me.

Admittedly, I think there’s some wider infrastructure failures on all levels (I remain confused as to why our private “citizens” channel has foreign government officials in it, or why we don’t even have standard forms for a Public Disclosure Form) that seriously deter or hinder new people, even combined with this poor choice of rebranding the “citizen” role. But since you asked specifically for my problems with the current citizenship system, there you have it. Feel free to critique it/ask about specific points.

[Aggie]

I generally agree with Jo.

I think that any citizenship application process has to balance ease of access, intuitivness, and security, and each region must decide how to balance these three factors, however, I think that most feeders nowadays have all ended up on really similar systems of a single application, and even though we’ve tried to prioritize accessibility, we’ve also ended up on something similar by pure trial and error, however, what we have ended up with is also more complicated and less intuitive for the reasons Jo mentioned.

Instead, I’d propose bringing the citizen/resident check back, with citizens being allowed to apply to the magisterium and EPSA and vote in elections, and the rest up to the executive/RP’s discretion. I don’t like how getting rid of this system would be branded as a potential rename: voter registration is currently a security check allowing you to vote, whereas a citizenship would allow you to vote plus also give you a basic security check so that it makes streamlining applications elesewhere easier, because that person has already been vetted.

The voter registration system has also made executive recruitment much harder: now we can’t figure out who’s just joined the discord to check things out and who wants to participate - citizenship applications were a good way of herding people into a thread, getting them cleared once and then contacting them based on the interests they’ve indicated. This just makes it messier.

I also reject any suggestion that this makes anything more accessible. It’s now harder to advertise voter registration because, as Jo said, we tell people that once they’re citizens they’re just ready to go. I understand the motivations behind this, but in my three years here, we’ve tried a good few systems and imo none worked as well as the original single citizenship application. The finicky details of this could be worked out later on (WA requirements, how we’ll transition etc.), but I think the important thing is to have a single citizenship application where people are vetted once and can then be corraled into different facets of the region with more ease. That only means one security check and one launchpoint into the region.

[Zukchiva]

I ask the Provost to close this thread.

I keep coming back to this and reading the opinions presented, and ultimately the votes seem to say basically “we’re split evenly”, and the vocal opinions in this thread (and to my memory, Discord) generally favor an idea of citizenship that I don’t really personally support (I don’t really think gatekeeping government stuff to a forum application really improves accessibility. Decrease confusion, perhaps, but it limits accessibility in the process). So penultimately there’s not much point to bumping this thread.

That being said, I do encourage anyone who does want a more definitive end to this issue to make a legislative proposal based on the opinions shared here and those on Discord when this was posted.