RC20? FC100? EM200? The history of the Cosa

Right now, Talossa has a 200 member Cosa where each of the Cosa member can hold up to 30 seat.

While Talossa always had a proportional system for electing Cosa Members (except for the 3th Cosa which had ranked ballots), the method for distributing those seats wasn’t constant over our history.

There are talk to changing the current system, but perhaps we should know how we came to the current system before thinking about changing it.

FC100

For the 6th Cosa, the Clark was introduced and the Cosa was composed of 100 seats where each party got an exact percentage of seats, with up to 2 decimals of precision. I call this FC100, for Fractional Cosa of 100 seats.

This means that many Cosa members had either 12.5 or 6.25, eand Sandee Macht even had 18.75 seats! In the 7th Cosa, we even have many Cosa members with 10.53 seats and Danihel Laurieir had 13.16 seats.

For the 6th Cosa, the prime-minister would get double the number of seats which was, when you think of it, rather weird. If party had 40 seats, and the PM was assigned 20 seats, he would get 20 extra seats, but if the 40 seats were divided equally between 4, the PM would get only 10 extra seats.

As a result, for the 7h Cosa, the prime-minister would get a fixed extra 10 seats.

EM200

This didn’t last either… for the 8th Cosa, the EM200 was introduced.

The Cosa would have exactly 200 members (no extra for the prime-minister) and Cosa members would get integral number: no more decimals!

This system is the same as in place today, and lasted from July 1988 until  23th Cosa election of July-August 1996 or 8 long years.

RC20

When the Organic Law was put in place in July 1996, a new Cosa was created, in fact, our institutions were completely reformed with the introduction of the Senate and the creation of RC20, or Real Cosa with 20 members, starting with the 23th Cosa election.

RC20 was once again a proportional system, but with only 20 members who each had exactly 1 vote.

This system really worked only for a few Cosas.

Initially, it was great since it provided for a system clearly similar to other legal systems in the world. The days of multiple seats per Cosa member was over and it limited to only 20 members the number of Cosa members.

It also meant we needed 20 actual people to fill those seats and since Senators could also be Cosa members (and often were), this wasn’t initially a problem.

The majority party, the PC, had the most active citizens and the PC, which counted the King as one of its members, rarely lacked Cosa members while the opposition parties, such as the TLP, ZRT or RCT, usually had enough active members to fill their seats.

Except that between 1999 and 2002, the King had slowly harassed several citizens into either leaving the Cosa or Talossa altogether. This is what lead to the Penguinea secession, the TLP party eventually stopping to even campaign and even several PC members having to flee the country such as defense minister Phil Ledgerwood who was tired of Ben ridiculing his religion.

So, during the 30th Cosa, we never managed to fill al of the 20 seats. During the first 3 Clarks, we only had 17 seats filled, and due to lack of voting, we were down to 13 by the 4th and 12 by the 5th.

That Cosa is famous for having Clarked only 14 bills,

It was urgent to do something, and something was done. The 6th Clark of the Cosa was prorogued and we returned for the last election using RC20. Fortunately, the 31st Cosa was almost full with 19 or 20 Cosa members sitting in the Cosa.

EM200, modified.

During the 31st Cosa, we decided to go back to EM200 to fix the problems, which was put in place for the 32th Cosa.

This time however, the EM200 wasn’t strictly proportional as the main author of the bill, King Ben Madison, wanted to increase the importance of the provinces.

As a result, for the first time, instead of having a single election, the Kingdom had 7 simultaneous elections (one per each of the original 7 provinces), all running at once.

The calculation was as follow:

1. The census of every province is taken on balloting day, including all citizens and known dandelions
2. The 200 seats of the Cosa are divided by population between the 7 provinces, as determined by the SoS
3. In each of the 7 provinces, the number of available seats is distributed according to the Cosa election votes for that province
4. Seats won in each province are then grouped together and not assigned just for Cosa members of that province.

That system was a nightmare to calculate, and I should know, I was the Secretary of State stuck with that method.

And yet, I did none of those special steps. Indeed, instead, the Database system I had built did it for me, and the table of calculations was updated each time a vote (which were then public) was cast.

I am convinced that without EM200, the Republic of Talossa would have never been born, but that’s story for another time. Just let it know that it’s not really a coincidence, in my opinion, that the secession occured at the end of the first Cosa after the return of EM200.

EM200 was the system in place when I left the Kingdom for the Republic, and from my understanding, once the database was on longer available to make the calculations, the provincial distribution was abandoned in favor of our current system, the same as for the 8th to the 23th Cosa.

And there you have it! The history of the way we have been electing the Cosa, ever since the Clark was created during the 6th Cosa.