[MR] Triton on Laurel's Decision regarding the Queen's Arms Change

[BATCOK at aol.com]

Greetings to Your Majesties, Your Highnesses, and My Fellow Atlantians.

This morning Gorm of Berra, Golden Dolphin Herald, announced the decision of 
the Laurel Herald regarding our petition to change the Arms of Her Majesty the 
Queen of Atlantia.  Several hours of debate could be spent in analyzing the 
whys and wherefores of the Laurel Herald's decision, but that would be 
pointless in deciding the course to be taken from here.  Golden Dolphin has pointed 
out three paths to take at this juncture which I would like to expound upon:

1. Accept the Laurel Herald's decision as final and move on with life, 
reverting to the use of the previous design (gold shell).

2. Re-conduct the polling to hopefully gain the show of support needed to 
convince the Laurel Herald of our desire to make the change.

3. Come up with a new design from scratch for submission and go through the 
whole thing again.

The first and third can be easily set aside as the Laurel Herald's decision 
is not based on the conflicting or illegal status of the submission.  If this 
were a matter of bad design or someone beating us to the idea, I would 
recommend either sticking with what we have registered or designing something else to 
use.  However, this is not the case, as Laurel has stated that his decision 
was based on an interpretation of how much support is enough support to change 
Important Kingdom Armory.

To address that clause we should examine the statistics of the last valid 
change to the Queen's Arms, in the reign of Stephan and Niobe AS XXXIII (Summer 
1999), when the escallop shell was changed from Erminois to Or (gold ermined 
black to plain gold).  For the sake of the argument (and because waiting for SCA 
Corporate to respond to a query on the subject would delay this missive) we 
will assume that the kingdom's populace has remained fairly constant from that 
period to this and use the rounded up number of 2100 to represent the populace 
of the Kingdom.

The polling of that time had 242 responses, of which 227 were in favor of the 
change and 15 were opposed.  That gives us 11% of the populace showing 93% 
support of the change for an effective 10% of the populace being in favor of 
changing the Queen's arms.

The next polling regarding the Queen's Arms was in the previous reign of 
Logan and Isabel (Summer ASXXXVI, 2002) to restore the ermine spots to the 
escallop shell and had a total response of 122.  Of those 38 were in favor of the 
change and 84 opposed, giving 5% of the populace showing 68% opposition to the 
change (an effective 1% of the populace supporting restoration of the ermine 
spots).  Based on this result the idea was abandoned by Their Majesties and 
another suggestion that came from the commentary was proposed as the next immediate 
polling.

That polling, the one referred to in the Laurel Herald's response, had a 
total return of 93 with 74 supporting and 19 opposing the switching of a Crown for 
the Escallop Shell.  That gives 4% of the populace showing 79% support for a 
total of 3% of the populace wanting the change.

The reason for this declining response is most likely apathy combined with 
confusion generated by the back-to-back pollings.  It is quite likely that 
members of the populace may have believed that their first polling votes and 
commentary would count toward the second polling.  Unfortunately, such is not 
possible as each polling must be conducted as a separate action.

My recommendation to Your Majesties, Your Highnesses, and My Fellow 
Atlantians would be to conduct a fresh polling with every effort taken to maximize the 
response to meet the Laurel Herald's 10% minimum approval rating.  With a 
desire to ensure the validity and integrity of the polling, both myself and the 
Golden Dolphin Herald must remain impartial arbitrators.  This does not preclude 
the Populace of Atlantia (including the remaining members of the Atlantian 
College of Heralds) from doing everything they can (within the boundaries of 
legality and reason) to maximize the response to the polling.

Alternately, there is another option available.  The Laurel Herald's decision 
could be challenged and taken to the Board of Directors.  In so doing the 
Laurel Herald would be obliged to define exactly how much of the populace must 
respond to a polling and how much of that response must be in favor of the 
proposal to make such a polling valid to support an Important Kingdom Armory 
change.  However, I would point out that the BoD has a tradition of backing Laurel 
in matters of administrative interpretation.

Baron Michael Batcok
Triton Principal Herald