GGL-005, Records and Continuity

Not law. Two things that belong together because both are about the Union surviving the people currently running it.

GGL-005: The public record, and keeping the Union running. The Union keeps a public record of what it does, in the order it happens. Things that go in it: someone is given, gives up or loses citizenship or e-residency; a law or Amendment is adopted; a vote opens or is counted; a petition is answered; someone takes or leaves a job; a penalty is given. Entries about citizenship do not name the person.

Entries are never changed or removed once made, and the record is published in a way that lets anyone tell if an entry has been changed or removed.

If there is no Vice President, and the President has not been active in the Union's affairs for 180 days, an election for Vice President is put up. The registry does that by itself and nobody has to ask for it. It does not remove or suspend the President, who stays in the job under Amendment I and votes in that election like anyone else. The 180 days start again any time the President is active.

Notes

Why the public record needs a law. It is published because the software publishes it, and nothing obliges it. A future maintainer who finds the append-only chain inconvenient can currently just stop writing to it. With this, they would be breaking the law rather than simplifying a module.

Entries not naming people reconciles two things that genuinely conflict. That the Union granted a citizenship on a date is an act of state and belongs in the record. Whose it was is that person's business, and CIT-008 forbids publishing a roll. So the entry records the act and not the person, which also stops the public record becoming a back door to the citizenship figures the Union does not publish.

The continuity problem. Amendment I makes the President irremovable and gives them the office for life. Amendment III makes the Vice President the successor. The Vice Presidency is vacant. So today, if the President died, the Union would have no head of state and no way to acquire one, because every mechanism runs through a vote and in practice votes are called by the President.

Why the registry may already do this, and why it should have a law anyway. The argument the code rests on is that Amendment III is silent on who may call a Vice Presidential election; that reading a power to block it into that silence is the reading Amendment V voids; and that filling a vacancy in one office is not removal from another. That argument is sound, and it is still an argument made by whoever wrote the file. A law replaces it with a decision the citizens took.

One hundred and eighty days is a guess - long enough that an ordinary absence never triggers it, short enough that the Union is not without a successor for years. Argue about the number.