GA #579: "Promoting Democratic Stability Act states thus:
However, individual member states are reserved the right to set all further regulations pertaining to elections.
This is a broad reservation that clearly blocks any regulation pertaining to elections (note the use of the word 'all') other than those that existed prior to the resolution's passage and those that exist in the resolution itself. The challenged proposal includes the following clauses:
Hereby requires:
- The government of a WA state is required to provide IDs to all inhabitants of that WA state upon request by that inhabitant for free, as soon as reasonably practicable, and may not charge any fee(s) for:
...
- applying;
- verifying;
- processing;
- issuing;
- replacing such IDs, including those lost, stolen and/or damaged; and/or
- delivery of such IDs;
- IDs validly issued by a WA state must be deemed valid and sufficient for all domestic affairs of that WA state, where proof of identity is required, including (but not limited to) all governmental, financial or business affairs;
Voting in an election constitutes a 'governmental affair' and thus comes under the purview of this proposal. The two above clauses taken together would prevent member states from requiring ID to vote unless such ID is issued free of charge. This is rather obviously a regulation pertaining to elections and is thus illegal for contradicting the blocker clause in GA #579. Although the challenged proposal does not explicitly mention elections at any point, the fact of the matter is that the provisions of the proposal would apply to elections.
As further evidence, I would like to point to the author's explicit statements of their intentions with this proposal. In their opening post, they mention that the debate over voter ID laws was the impetus for this draft:
Simone Republic wrote:This is in response to the debate on voter ID laws and voting rights guarantees on the "voting rights guarantees" proposal.
In addition, the author in a later comment explicitly lays out that the purpose of the challenged proposal is to regulate voter ID laws:
Simone Republic wrote:This is a backdoor way to get voter ID laws in place due to the blocker in GA#579.
There can therefore be no accusation that I am stretching in saying that the challenged proposal sets regulations pertaining to elections in contradiction to GA #579, given that the author themselves has put forward that very interpretation. Although the author's comments do not constitute part of the proposal's text, I nonetheless believe that they should be taken as indicative evidence of the validity of my interpretation by GenSec. I therefore contend that the proposal 'Identity Documents Issuance' is illegal for breaking the Contradiction rule.