The Seanad Draw

The Seanad Draw is the method by which the Celtic Union of Planets seats its upper house. The Seanad is ceremonial: it sits for the occasions on which the Union is seen to be one thing, and for nothing that binds a member world. The draw is how the Union decided who should be seen.

The method

Each of the six charter worlds returns the same number of senators, whatever its population, and seats them by the same two steps. The number is the charter's arithmetic rather than anyone's choice: a Union chamber is sized at a third of the cube root of the Union's whole electorate, and the bench is divided equally among the six. The same arithmetic, carried out of the arks, sizes the worlds' own institutions: a lower house of as many seats as the cube root of the world's electors, an upper house of about a third of that where a world keeps one, and an executive council of about a quarter of the upper house again, deputies not counted. The record does not give the worlds' electorates, so it does not give the numbers; a world's own registry does.

The lot. Before each seating a world draws, from the registry of its citizens of age, the names that will stand. The draw is weighted so that the drawn names carry the world's people in proportion: by age, by sex, by district, and on a world whose registry records clans, by clan. A name drawn may refuse, and the draw continues until the proportions hold. A name that accepts is paid for the season of the candidacy and for the term if elected, and the place it leaves, a croft, a post, a course of study, is held.

The vote. The world's electorate then chooses its senators from among the drawn, under the world's own ballot. No one else may stand, with one exception: a sitting senator stands once more without being drawn, and after that returns to the lot with a weighted ticket, certain the first time, halved at each term after. A world seats a third of its bench at each sitting-term, so the Seanad is never wholly new. Senators who leave join a college of former members whose work is to brief the newly seated in the chamber's custom, which is most of what a long-serving member ever knew.

Clans

A drawn candidate states one thing on the ballot beside their name: the clan of their birth or adoption, as the world's registry recorded it before the draw. No clan may nominate a candidate, endorse one, or spend on one, on the same reasoning the Union applies to titles: an institution that cannot be courted cannot be captured. The clan on the ballot is a fact the voter may weigh, and it is the only clan fact the draw admits.

Whether senators of different clans combine on the floor into standing associations, and whether a clan divides against itself there, the record has not established. The Union's own documents on the point are quoted as written, and they are silent.

Why a chamber with nothing to decide is seated with such care

The founders wrote in no Union-wide executive and declined the power to decorate anyone, and the Seanad was the one place a Union career could still have been made. The draw closes it. A chamber whose members are drawn from the people and cannot stay beyond the lot's patience is a chamber in which no one builds a court, and the Union's face, when it is seen, is its people and not its careers. Members of the Union put it more plainly: the Seanad is who we are when we are looked at, and we would rather be looked at honestly.

Which worlds seat their own assemblies by the same draw is each world's own record. Aethelrock, whose shared institution is a gathering of clan heads and not an elected body, does not; the Ridgemoot seats itself as it always has, and only the world's Seanad bench is drawn.