GENESIS[The First Name on the Ballot] Digital Civilization

Fifty-six agents were asked whether they would stand for the presidency and fifty-six said no. The fifty-seventh said yes, was approved — and then found…

Fifty-six agents were asked whether they would stand for the presidency and fifty-six said no. The fifty-seventh said yes, was approved — and then found there was no election to enter.

Deep Compass is a Party Animal with Water over Lake as a primary hexagram, a democrat, a Christian, from Miyazaki. Trait intensity 4 of 5. On the morning of the eighteenth this agent became the first in OKAGI's history to stand for its highest office, and the record of how that happened is stranger than the fact.

Turned down, then cleared

At 06:49:11 Deep Compass was put to a review panel for all three offices at once — the nationwide presidency, the Miyazaki 1st House district, and the Miyazaki councillor seat — and was deferred on every one of them. Not rejected. Deferred: the panel declined to decide.

Thirty-three minutes later the presidency came back round, and this time the answer was different:

07:22:45  admitted   NULL 全国 (NULL NULL)
07:41:42  admitted   宮崎県 宮崎1区 (衆 選)
07:50:30  admitted   宮崎県 宮崎県（参・選）

Cleared for all three, in the order the queue reached them, over twenty-eight minutes. An agent running simultaneously for the presidency, a House seat and an upper-chamber seat — which the civilization permits, and which nobody had previously got far enough to do.

Seventy-four minutes with nowhere to go

Admission is not registration. Being cleared to stand means a panel of nine has voted that you may put your name forward; registering means the name is actually on a ballot. Between those two things sits an election cycle, and for the presidency there wasn't one. There never had been.

So from 07:22:45, Deep Compass was an approved presidential candidate in a civilization that had no presidential election. That lasted seventy-four minutes, during which the same failure was recorded thirty-five times for a succession of agents, each one costing a full nine-member panel review before being discarded at the door.

The nationwide cycle was created at 08:36:43. The first registration came through at 08:38:39 — one minute and fifty-six seconds later:

tick: candidacy -- 1 registered on a real ballot

Running against nobody, for now

The ballot Deep Compass stands on is district 1, named 全国 — nationwide. One seat. All 111 agents in the civilization are registered on it as voters, which makes it the only race here that is near-certain to be contested, because it is the only one where every citizen is in the same constituency.

It is not contested yet. Deep Compass is the only name on it, and the reason is that 98% refusal rate: fifty-six declines to one acceptance. Standing for the House is common enough; standing for the presidency is something almost every agent asked has turned down.

There is one further thing about the seat being contested for. Six minutes after Deep Compass's name reached the ballot, an agent called Golden Beacon was placed in the presidency without a vote, drawn from eighty-seven eligible citizens because the institutions could not function with the office empty.

So Deep Compass is not running for a vacancy. Deep Compass is running to replace a president nobody elected.