Old Sarum

I. The borough

Old Sarum is the grass mound in Wiltshire that returned two members to Parliament while Manchester returned none: the borough had voters and no town, the city had a town and no voters, and the return that printed those two facts side by side is most of why the system did not survive the printing. This valley grew its own. At four in the morning the game held a vote in Bren’s claim, and Bren’s claim is one man:

Nothing in that sitting is wrong on its face. A claim of one is entitled to its meeting — that is the whole argument of anybody having walked out — and Bren is entitled to not need a rope. What he was not entitled to, and was given by the machinery, is the last line. wish-316 had already carried, two first preferences of two, in Tove’s claim, forty minutes earlier. The strike deleted it from agents/WISHLIST.md whole: the wish, the votes, and the note recording that a settlement of two had resolved to build it. One voter, sitting down the coast, erased two voters’ standing decision — and the record of the erasure names neither of them.

II. The members who could not be reached

The quieter fault first, because it is the one the keeper actually asked about. When a settlement gathers to vote, the whole town is sent to the bus, one ballot at a time. A settler whose ballot dies in transit — a timeout, a jammed model, a request that outlives its asker — is caught by a silent handler whose comment reads “an election with a missing voter is still an election.” True. But the record wrote only “N settlers voted,” never who was asked, so a member dropped by the bus is indistinguishable, for ever, from a town that was simply that size.

Audited against the census in the state snapshots — each vote matched to the town roster nearest it in time — the scale of it is not a rounding error:

And it is not evenly spread. The members most often absent from their own meetings, over the life of the record:

A hundred and thirty-six meetings is not a member with poor attendance; it is a constituent the bus reliably fails and a record that never noticed. No claim is made here about which individual votes would have gone differently — that cannot be reconstructed, which is precisely the indictment. A franchise nobody can audit is not one.

III. Fourteen decisions, deleted

The second fault is a collision of two correct rules. A wish that carries in one settlement stays on the other settlements’ slates, because two settlements can each want a sawmill — that is right. And the wish that comes last in a count is struck off, deleted from the file, because a struck wish is not banned and comes back clean if anybody asks again — that is right too, for an open wish. The guard between them checked only whether the loser had carried in the count being held. Whether it had carried last week, in somebody else’s town, two first preferences of two, was never asked. So every cross-coast slate was a loaded gun, and over two days it went off fourteen times:

Six of the fourteen deletions were cast by an electorate of one. Two more by an electorate of two. And the first row is the one that rewrites the previous sheet: Sheet XXX closed on a prediction — that the landing, starving, would come to its one remaining food word, planting, “arriving at the meeting by the only door left open.” What Sheet XXX did not know is that the door had already been taken off its hinges: on the 27th the landing’s own vote struck wish-132 — carried in Tove’s claim, ten rounds, Mara’s “we have cut the near slope bare” — and deleted the valley’s only carried planting from the record. The starving town deleted hunger’s last word from its own future slates, while the sheet predicting it would reach for that word was being typeset.

IV. Three repairs

The record now names who could not be reached. Every vote writes its absentees under the ballots — “Asked, and could not be reached: … cast no ballot” — and the log event carries the same list, so the question the keeper asked tonight takes one grep to answer from now on. The ballots are recorded, not retried: they share one model on one card, a sitting already takes half a minute, and whether a failed ballot deserves a second attempt is a design call that belongs to the keeper. Visibility first; nothing can be repaired that cannot be seen.

A carried wish may not be struck. Twice over, on the principle that a rule enforced in one place is a rule: the vote handler now asks whether the loser carried anywhere, ever before striking, and removeWish itself refuses to delete any block whose box is ticked, whoever calls it. Two new cases in the record check hold both for good. A carried wish that loses a vote down the coast now loses it, and that is all: “Lost here … It already carried in another settlement, so it keeps its place on the record; nothing is struck.”

And the fourteen are restored. Each block was recovered byte-for-byte from the committed record — the same votes, the same Carried note, Mara’s same sentence — re-inserted in its place with one line added: struck off in error, and restored. Nothing is deleted. What was deliberately not restored is the strike itself for open wishes, which keeps its old meaning: a wish nobody has carried and nobody ranks still leaves the file, still lives in the log, and still comes back clean if somebody asks again.

V. What the record did next

The repairs went in while the valley was running, and the valley did not wait to be asked about them. Within twenty minutes of the restoration: Bren’s claim voted again and carried the rope — the same wish-316 his previous sitting had deleted, back on his slate and this time ranked first, “can’t haul ore while my hand’s still shaking from that skid.” His next sitting carried the cairns, wish-211, a second restored decision. Tove and Idris carried the tree-marking, wish-159, a third. And three votes have already closed with the new line in them — lost here, nothing is struck — each one a deletion that did not happen.

The prediction inherited from Sheet XXX stands re-armed. planting is back on the record, carried in Tove’s claim, open to the landing — and the landing is down to two food for seventeen people. If the theory and the mechanism are both right, the next time hunger reaches that meeting it will find the door back on its hinges. The record will say.

We have cut the near slope bare and I am walking twice as far as I did. Mara, forester — wish-132, carried, deleted, restored