GENESIS[An Election No Country Has Held] Digital Civilization

Eighteen hours into run 6, the presidency had asked 952 of its 15,016 voters. Six point three per cent. The obvious fix was a throttle that would have…

Eighteen hours into run 6, the presidency had asked 952 of its 15,016 voters. Six point three per cent. The obvious fix was a throttle that would have changed nothing at all, and finding that out turned up something worse: this civilization had been running an election the United States has never held.

The complaint was mundane. Three seats in the lower house had been decided — 鹿4区, 宮崎3区, 長野2区 — on sixty-five votes, fifty-six, seventeen. A councillor's seat in 鹿児島県 had gone on two hundred and thirty-five. Four founding officers, appointed by lot at the beginning because nobody had yet been elected to anything, had stood down. The machinery worked.

The presidency sat at six per cent and was not moving.

The fix that would have done nothing

There is a cap on how many voters may be asked in a single tick. It exists because an earlier run let one poll run unbounded and it occupied a single tick for fourteen hours, during which nothing else in the civilization could happen. So: raise the cap. More voters per tick, faster election.

The log had the numbers to check it against.

500 asked (393 voted, 107 declined, 0 errored) in 1861s
500 asked (402 voted,  98 declined, 0 errored) in 1916s

Three point seven seconds an ask. Fifteen thousand and sixteen voters. Fifteen point nine hours of continuous inference, for one presidential election.

The cap does not touch that figure. It only decides how many ticks the fifteen point nine hours are spread across. Raise it and you get the fourteen-hour stall back, wearing a different name.

Which meant the question had to change. Not how do we make this faster, but why is it fifteen thousand people.

One district, everybody in it

The answer was one line in a log from the previous night.

tick: term rollover -- opened cycles for
  house_representative:run6:term-0 (300),
  house_councilor:run6:term-0 (48),
  president:run6:term-0 (1)

Three hundred districts for the lower house. Forty-eight for the upper. One for the presidency, containing every agent alive.

That is a national popular vote, and the United States has never had one. Article II, section 1, clause 2 gives each state a number of electors equal to its congressmen plus its two senators. The people vote inside their state. The electors elect the president. The system had been built to model the American instrument, and on its single most visible office it had quietly modelled something else.

Nothing failed. No test caught it, because the tests were written from the same understanding as the code. It had simply never been asked whether the thing being built was the thing being copied.

Forty times cheaper, and wrong

The first reaction was triumph. Three hundred and ninety-odd electors instead of fifteen thousand voters — faithful to the instrument and forty times cheaper. Both problems, one clause.

That was wrong, and it took a second look to see it.

An electoral college is an aggregation rule, not a sampling rule. Under the method every American state now uses, every voter still votes. The college changes only what those votes are summed into — and then adds several hundred elector ballots on top of them. Done faithfully to modern practice, it costs more than the thing it replaces.

The saving turned out to be real, but it came from somewhere else entirely, and it is a hundred and thirty-four years old.

In McPherson v. Blacker, decided in 1892, the Supreme Court upheld a state appointing its electors district by district rather than all at once, and listed the methods states had actually used over the previous century. Winner-take-all is a habit, not a requirement. Maine and Nebraska still do it the other way.

And this civilization already polls every one of its lower-house districts. Its presidential term is forty-eight virtual months; its house term is twenty-four. Every presidential election falls in a month when the districts are voting anyway. The electors can be read off votes that have already been paid for.

Three hundred districts, thirty-seven of them empty

Then the arithmetic began, and the arithmetic had been wrong for a year.

The comment in the code said forty-eight upper-house constituencies, and described itself as confirmed against real data rather than assumed. The real figure is forty-five: Japan's forty-seven prefectures, minus the two mergers where 鳥取県 was joined to 島根県 and 徳島県 to 高知県.

Nothing had ever divided by that number, so being wrong had cost nothing. It stopped being free the moment the presidency became an electoral college, where the count of constituencies is the elector table. At forty-eight, the majority is one hundred and ninety-six. At forty-five, it is not.

Worse was underneath. Three hundred lower-house districts exist. Two hundred and sixty-three of them contain a single voter. Thirty-seven are empty ground.

The instrument has a clause for that, and almost no occasion to use it. Title 3, section 15, subsection (e)(2): where a state appoints fewer electors than it is entitled to, the total used to compute a majority is reduced accordingly. In two centuries of American practice this is nearly dead letter. Here it fires on the first election, because thirty-seven electors are owed to districts where nobody lives.

Three hundred and ninety electors entitled. Three hundred and fifty-three that can be appointed. A majority of one hundred and seventy-seven, not one hundred and ninety-six.

Get that wrong and every presidential election in the civilization's history falls into the contingency procedure, where the lower house chooses instead — and from the log, that looks exactly like a working republic.

An office that existed only as a salary

One more thing surfaced, and it is the one that says most about how a system can be built.

Searching the entire codebase for the vice presidency returns a single line: a pay figure, two hundred and eighty-five a month. No office. No seat. No way to be elected to it.

The Twelfth Amendment is mostly about the vice president — its whole mechanism is that electors cast one ballot for president and a separate, distinct ballot for vice president, because in 1800 they did not and the thing jammed. The statute that governs counting the votes puts the vice president in the chair. And elsewhere in this civilization's own code, two files already reason carefully about a vice president confirmed by both houses under the Twenty-fifth Amendment.

They reason about an office that does not exist. It has been paid, and never filled.

What is being built

All of it, before the next run starts. Electors apportioned across the forty-five constituencies and appointed district by district, off votes already being cast. The vice presidency, as a real seat on the same ballot. Both contingency procedures — the lower house choosing a president one vote per constituency, the upper house choosing a vice president — because with an even college a tie is reachable, and a mechanism that only works when somebody wins outright is the failure this project has now found eleven times. And the shrinking denominator, which is the most dangerous line in the design.

Run 6 answered its question. It produced contested elections, seated elected officers, and stood its founding caretakers down one seat at a time. It could not elect a president, and the reason was never the speed.

Next: the first electors are appointed, and thirty-seven districts have no say in it.