HIGH COURT OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC
CASE SUBMISSION

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I, sandaoguo, respectfully submit the following case for consideration by the High Court. I hereby state that the information within this submission is true to the best of my knowledge, and that there is no malicious intent or vexatious nature to it. I further promise to make myself available to any future questions or request from the Court in order to ensure that this case is fairly considered.

REFERENCE NAME
In re Assembly Vote Closures

ARGUMENT
In 2206.HR, this august Court ordered the Chair of the Assembly, The Haugtherlands, herein "the Chair", to issue a determination on the status of Legislator philipmacaroni's vote on A2205.02 - Assembly Resolution to Call a Great Council (Modified). However, the underlying question of law remains unsettled. Indeed, the Chair has not complied fully with the Court's order, instead summarily announcing the passage of A2205.02 without explanation to the Assembly. As such, I submit this Legal Question to clarify what the determining factor is for when an Assembly vote ends: an automatic closure time set via poll options, or the time announced by the Chair (or their duly appointed deputy) in the official notice.

Additionally, because the validity of the the Chair's summary declaration of A2205.02's passage rests upon this question, I humbly request that the Court issue a temporary injunction against the Chair from transmitting the resolution to the Local Council, and incidentally against the Local Council from proceeding with an in-game vote on the resolution. This is necessary to avoid constitutional confusion.

In regards to the determining factor for the end of Assembly votes, it is ultimately the Times Act and the conventional practice of Assembly that answers this question. As seen in A2205.02, the convention in the Assembly is to define a specific date and time, including hours and minutes, for when a vote closes. This can be seen in earlier votes as well, such as with A2002.06 (https://tspforums.xyz/thread-7955.html) from February 2020. Section 2(1) of the Times Act states that any deadline "that establish[es] a specific hour and minute must use the official Time bbcode, to ensure displayed times are shown in local timezones." The Chair did comply with this legal requirement, as A2205.02 does indeed use the Time bbcode. Additionally, the Chair provided a link to the Time and Date Live Countdown Timer.

However, the Chair also employed the use of the forum software's built-in poll closing option. This option is not tuned to specific hours and minutes. It only accepts full days as an input. Behind the scenes, that input of X days is converted to seconds (https://github.com/mybb/mybb/blob/6ab629...s.php#L926). In other words, 5 days is converted to 432,000 seconds. To determine poll closure time, the forum software takes the exact time the poll was posted as Unix time, adds the 432,000 seconds, and if the current Unix time is equal to or greater than that time, the poll is closed. In short, the built-in closing option only allows ending a poll X*60*60*24 seconds after its creation, where X is the number of whole days.

This is at odds with the Times Act and Assembly convention, as the legal deadline is given in a specific date and time, down to the hours, minutes, and seconds. In the case of A2205.02, this deadline was given as 21:30:03. For compliance with the Times Act, we can disregard seconds as the act only requires specificity down to the minute. Therefore, the legal deadline was 21:30:00 GMT-0400, or 9:30 PM EDT on 5/18/2022. However, the poll auto-closure via the software would close the poll at 9:08 PM 5/18/2022, exactly 432,000 seconds after its opening. This is discrepancy of 22 minutes. It would be a violation of any Legislator's substantive voting rights to say that the explicit deadline given by the Chair is superseded by a hidden deadline decided by the forum software. (The forum software doesn't display an exact date and time, it only sates the date a poll will close [see exhibit A].) Indeed, the Times Act exists specifically because the substantive voting rights implications of unclear stated deadlines.

Legislator philipmacaroni requested their vote be changed to Abstain at 9:21 PM EDT, 9 minutes before the Times Act-defined deadline (https://tspforums.xyz/thread-10452-post-...#pid231119). Had the auto-closure setting reflected the way the Times Act and the posted deadline worked, the poll would not have been closed yet and philipmacaroni would have been able to undo their vote and cast it as Abstain themselves.

Because the Chair, following longstanding Assembly convention, uses specific hours and minutes to define vote closure times, those times must comply with the Times Act. As such, the legal vote closure deadline for A2205.02 was indeed 21:30 GMT-0400, or 9:30 PM EDT, on 5/18/2022, not 9:08 PM EDT. The auto-closure was invalid and denied philipmacaroni is right to vote. The Chair's determination that the vote must be counted as Aye, instead of Abstain, is constitutionally erroneous and must be corrected. The final tally for A2205.02 must be 25 Ayes, 17 Nays, and 9 Abstentions, and therefor must fall short of the required 60% threshold for passage.

Exhibit A: Example of poll auto-closure date display


REQUEST
Is the determinant for Assembly vote closure times the stated deadline provided by the Chair (or their duly appointed deputy), or the auto-closure settings set by forum software?