Charter government cannot define itself
One of the hardest parts of the charter to come to grips with was preventing the government from having any say in defining itself. Articles like this, and almost daily examples in the news, convinced me how important this was. Of course, the charter will never be adopted, but what the hey, it's not perfect.
For example, Colorado Constitution article XI, section 1, forbids government debt on behalf of corporations in the most comprehensive language possible:
Neither the state, nor any county, city, town, township or school district shall lend or pledge the credit or faith thereof, directly or indirectly, in any manner to, or in aid of, any person, company or corporation, public or private, for any amount, or for any purpose whatever; or become responsible for any debt, contract or liability of any person, company or corporation, public or private, in or out of the state.
The next section of the Constitution, article XI, section 2, also uses the broadest language possible to outlaw government aid to corporations:
Neither the state, nor any county, city, town, township, or school district shall make any donation or grant to, or in aid of, or become a subscriber to, or shareholder in any corporation or company or a joint owner with any person, company, or corporation, public or private, in or out of the state ...
The Colorado Supreme Court, however, has usurped for itself the power of constitutional amendment. Today, the Court does not enforce the text of the anti-corporate welfare sections of the Colorado Constitution, with their blanket language such as "directly or indirectly, in any manner to, or in aid of." Instead, according to the court, all corporate welfare is permissible whenever the legislature rationally believes that the welfare might have some beneficial effects. The plain text of the Colorado Constitution has in effect been replaced by the court's lawless imposition of a rational basis test that legalizes precisely what the Colorado Constitution was enacted to forbid.
Lawyers suck. Unaccountable government lawyers in fancy robes suck even more.
Charter government's definition is almost entirely in the hands of the people themselves.
District voting is entirely up to people. People submit bills and candidates to election companies who schedule their own elections. All ballots are published, minus any personal information, along with cryptographic signatures which can't be forged, allowing all voters to check their own ballot receipts to verify correctness, and allowing everybody to add up all the published ballots to know the election outcomes. There is no government involvement whatsoever.
There are two drawbacks: election companies want to be paid, but if you aren't willing to spend $5 or $10 to vote, then you aren't serious about voting. And voting has to be in person; no vote-by-mail, no absentee voting. This allows everyone else to size up voters for lunatics, people who can't speak the language, etc, and also allows poll watchers to count voters and compare with the count of published ballots.
District voters have to pass a bylaw to schedule the next legislator election. If they do not, no more legislators are elected and all terms expire, the legislature is empty and can do nothing. District voters can recall legislators by scheduling an early election, and they do not have to elect any replacements.
District bylaws define legislature chambers as to who gets to vote and the length of legislator terms. The simplest is one vote per voter. One voter per child also seems possible and maybe even likely. Voting acres of land ownership is an echo of the US Senate, and in practice favors farmers and ranchers, not rich people; it is not land value, but acres owned. Whether it would happen, I do not know. The point is, if voters repeal or do not renew a chamber definition, it vanishes, and if all chambers vanish, so does the legislature.
Legislature districts are owned by the people whose land they cross. Parcel owners can move district borders as they wish, effectively relocating their parcels from one district to another; if a district has no parcels remaining, it vanishes. People can create new districts at will. Governments have no say in the matter. Election companies can postpone changes once they've scheduled elections and printed ballots, but that's just common sense.
District bylaws override legislature bylaws. If the legislature votes to raise taxes, district voters can opt out.
District bylaws, whether direct or by legislation, override parent district bylaws. Neighborhoods override cities, cities override counties, counties override states, and states override national.
The only part of the legislature which is outside both district voter and legislature control is the charter definitions.
All bills, both district and legislature, must wait at least 30 days before they can be voted on, and expire if they haven't passed in 90 days. Revisions are effectively new bills; the old vanishes, and the 30 and 90 day clocks start from scratch.
All chambers must pass legislation by 2/3 vote to enact bylaws.
Any chamber by itself can vote by simple majority to repeal any bylaws.
Anyone can challenge any bylaw, district or legislature, for being defective. In simple terms this means it is not understood. In more explicit terms, bylaws must be consistent, both with themselves and with other bylaws, and in enforcement; they must be minimal and relevant; they must be clear and complete; and anything else which leads to confusion voids them entirely; only legislatures and district voters can change bylaws.
The simplest test is to hire 12 adults, put them in individual rooms with the bylaw, a pad of paper, a pen, and maybe a dictionary. They write down what they think the bylaw does. If more than one or two disagree, the bylaw is not clear enough to be understood. It is void. There are no appeals. The moral is to not wrote 2000 page bills.
Furthermore, those 12 descriptions freeze the bylaw's definition. All bylaws expire in 1.5 years unless renewed. No one gets to come along a year later with some new tricky definition of what that bylaw allows. If a bylaw says all voters must ink their right index finger to prevent voting twice, no one can turn backwards, hold his left arm backwards, and call that his right finger, unless those 12 descriptions had pointed that out as a possibility.
There's a lot more to defect challenges and everything about the legislature, but that's the general flavor.
The US Constitution was a fantastic first draft, especially considering its times. But it puts too much power in government's hands, especially defining itself. When push comes to shove, government judges will come down on government's side more often than not. I don't know what it would take to fix it; maybe my 12 juror review would be enough. But look at how the Colorado justices have gutted such explicit language! Even if they get overruled by citizen ballot initiatives, the damage has been done, and it would be almost impossible to unwind any of it.
In my rush to only write about how the charter government cannot define itself or its limits, I mentioned the near-absolute control land owners have over legislative districts which cross their parcels. This is impossible in all legacy political systems I know of, because legislators get one vote and represent the entire district. It's one justification in the US for a census every ten years which leads to the government redrawing district boundaries after every census, which usually leads to the oddest-looking districts you can imagine, court battles over better district maps, and which coined the word "gerrymander" for one particularly egregious example of partisan districts. The partisan goal is to cram your opponents into districts by themselves and your own party into mere majority districts; if their districts are 90% majority and yours are 60%, your minority can usually win more districts at the next election than warranted.
One solution legacy systems adopt is at-large representation, where everyone in the entire legislature jurisdiction votes for all representatives. That works for city supervisors, but wouldn't be very practical for the 435 seats in the US House of Representatives. Even splitting the full House into separate states wouldn't work for the larger status with 52 representatives. No one's going to look at the hundreds of candidate there would be.
At any rate, the charter solution eliminates all that squabble. Disgust with the census every ten years is what inspired the charter in the first place. In typical government fashion, it went from needing to know how many people lived in each house to wanting to know everybody's name, age, occupation, and something like 50 nosy questions. It's what enabled the US government to locate all the Japanese-Americans in WW II to relocate them to internment camps.
Of course the courts went along with everything. I suppose their excuse was the government providing schools, social security, medical care, welfare, buses, playgrounds, parks, and so on was the convenient excuse, but it's too nosy for my tastes. Businesses find out far more snoopy marketing information with surveys, and the reality of drawing district lines while avoiding splitting cities in half means districts aren't all equally sized anyway.
So charter legislators don't get a single vote in the legislature. They cast as many votes as they won in their district election. I call it proxying. At first, it was one representative who proxies all the election votes, but that continues the legacy lie that the legislator represents everybody in his district, including everyone who explicitly voted against him. It also assumes voter representation matches total population, which isn't true; turnout varies from 60-80% in different districts at the same election.
So I changed districts to elect three legislators apiece, and each only proxies the votes they themselves won, making them much closer to true representatives. That left the problem of all the remaining votes. I thought of electing every candidate who got more than 10% of the votes, but it's already tripled the size of the House, to 1305 representatives from 435, and 10% could potentially elect 10 representatives from each district; 4,350 legislators! No, that would never fly.
The solution was to allow every voter to drop a name in the ballot box, then choose one at random (who can of course decline the honor) to be a fourth legislator, the amateur, who proxies all the remaining votes from the election. He doesn't really represent those voters, but anyone who'd agree to uproot his life for two years to move to Washington, DC, is more of a rebel than the professional politicians and probably comes closer to representing everyone who didn't vote for the three winners.
It did expand the House to a ridiculous 1740 legislators, but that's easily solved by just having fewer districts. Then districts came under the control of land owners, no longer had to align with state boundaries, and the total shrank way back. As I kept reducing government power, it became less important for all legislators to meet in one great big building. They could do everything from home -- email, chat forums, conference calls -- and it became more of a part-time job, so no amateur had to uproot his life for two years.
It still doesn't solve the problem of voters not matching the full population, but it does encourage voting even when your favored candidate is unlikely to win, since all votes count in the legislature, not just the solo winner of legacy systems. That would probably raise turnout. It reduces election fraud: a few fraudulent votes can change a winner-takes-all result, but switching 1st and 2nd place is meaningless on its own, and even switching 3rd and 4th place only gives the amateur more votes.
But that's enough of that. One of my eBooks, Fishing For Freedom, is a fictionalized account of how the charter developed. It's generally correct in matching some of the convoluted steps I followed, but terrible literature and not worth the $0.00 price; I will never make a living as an author.