Nomic:Game 2005-04-02:Arguments against rule318

From Carls wiki

According to a subset of the current rules:

104

All rule-changes proposed in the proper way shall be voted on. They will be adopted if and only if they receive the required number of votes.

105

Every player is an eligible voter. Every eligible voter must participate in every vote on rule-changes.

109

Rule-changes that transmute immutable rules into mutable rules may be adopted if and only if the vote is unanimous among the eligible voters. Transmutation shall not be implied, but must be stated explicitly in a proposal to take effect.

110

In a conflict between a mutable and an immutable rule, the immutable rule takes precedence and the mutable rule shall be entirely void. For the purposes of this rule a proposal to transmute an immutable rule does not "conflict" with that immutable rule.

It will be attempted to show here that rule 318 - Real Men conflicts with rule 105, namely the part every player is an eligible voter. Starting by an obvious observation: A non-eligible voter has 0 votes. This doesn't necesseralily mean that an eligible voter has a nonzero number of votes but it should be a definite hint at that being the case. The question is: What is an eligible voter? The reasonable definition seems to be "one that has the right to vote".

According to rule 109: Rule-changes that transmute immutable rules into mutable rules may be adopted if and only if the vote is unanimous among the eligible voters.

A vote being unanimous among the eligible voters, which, according to rule 105 is every player. Now clearly: setting someone's number of votes to 0 would make it difficult to make an unanimous vote among all the players since some of them wouldn't really be voting at all. Hence reducing a player's number of votes to 0 must be against rule 105's paragraph saying that every player is an eligible voter.