Yes, Abolish the Current System

We all agree that Aytos's system needs to change. I am its main author, and even I agree that our system was designed for a much larger larger population than we have. I'm not sorry for writing it that way, because at the time I wrote it we had five different towns who wanted to join the Aytian Federation. Nobody could have anticipated back then that they would all evaporate and move to Etherium. But they did, and this makes the current system in many ways a big complicated thing that doesn't do much. We need to get rid of the complexity and go back to ABC's.

Council Government, not Strongman Government

Monkey's plan for Aytos is to give complete control to one strong leader, the Prime Minister. Strattmatt on the other hand has proposed bringing back the council system Aytos had before the current constitution.

One leader must not be allowed to rule with no checks or balances on their power. But creating a system with many checks and balances, and multiple roles designed to play watchdog over each other is complicated, and hard to balance perfectly. Councils on the other hand are simple. So I support replacing the current Aytos government system with a City Council.

Minority Rights, and the Three-day Rule

"The majority has the right to rule, but the minority has the right to be heard before decisions are made final".

This is the fundamental principle of parliamentary procedure, and without it you can't have a Western-style democracy. Without the Principle you can't even have a council system, because a "council" where members won't listen to each others' counsel is an oxymoron.

In all councils and parliaments there are rules and systems to make sure the Principle is enforced. In Aytos we have a simple "three-day rule": the Aytos Parliament can't vote on a bill until all members have had three days to see and discuss it. This simple rule is enough to guarantee that people have a chance to say if they disagree, and have a chance to change other peoples' minds before a bad law is voted in. An Aytos Council should have some equivalent to the three-day rule.

Supermajorities

Another type of rule that stems from the Principle is needing a supermajority vote (2/3 for example) to change the rules by which all other actions are taken. If this type of rule isn't in place, any temporary majority could just remove a rule that says everyone needs to be heard before the vote, and then violate the Principle as much as they wanted.

Now if there are only three people on a Council, a majority vote is 2/3, meaning there is no distinction between a majority and a supermajority. This means any majority always has the ability to remove all its own rules, even if for example they were only elected by 51% of the voters. This is a problem. We need to either make it so that a supermajority on our Council is defined as all three members, not 2/3, or else fix the size of the Council at something other than three.

Size four gives the opposite problem: a 3/4 supermajority is needed to make ordinary laws. Size 5 is the smallest number that solves this problem, so I think it is the optimal mumber of members to have. Aytos's original parliament was fixed at 5 members, and that was the time period in which we had our greatest success as a city. Tigerstaden also had a parliament of 5 members, and it was one of the most successful cities of civcraft 1.0. I prefer the idea of a five-member Council.

Other miscellaneous positions

I am in favor of keeping a citizens' recall option like the no-confidence vote.

I am in favor of keeping STV/Proportional Representation, and think a 3rd party internet site like demochoice.org could be a good way to pull this off without needing a permanent ministry (an unbiased internet computer would calculate and display election results).