First, I was incorrect when I say there will be "no net effect" of this judgement. Back to it's original purpose, IT INVALIDATES ALL PAST ENDORSEMENT TRUST TOKENS.
So if you've been collecting trust tokens, you might care. I think a main issue with Alexis's arguments for CFJ 3569 are here: > Per established precedent, the correctness of a ballot submission is > evaluated > at the time of its submission. I'm not sure what "established precedent" Alexis is citing. However, most of the precedents that I'm aware of are for INFORMAL conditional actions, not conditional voting. For conditional actions, there's no official Rules governance. So the body of precedent built up says "if AT THE TIME OF THE ACTION it's relatively reasonable effort to resolve the conditional, it works." However, the Conditional Votes rule was explicitly written to get around this. It does so by effectively re-defining (at Power 3) the term "clearly specified" so that it's retroactive - if the Conditional is determinate at the END of the voting period, then we retroactively declare that it was clear when cast. (It's kind of like ratification). Or similarly, at the time the vote is cast, the rules *defer* the determination of "clear" until the end. There's no reason that this retroactive clarity can't work, because we don't need to determine clarity until after the voting period ends[*]. "It was clear when cast, because it 'ratified' that way" is no more philosophically difficult than ratification. Especially because the rule was designed that way and has functioned this way for over 10 years. Now, the mess of rules around the terms "votes", "options", and "ballots" is enough that I can't guarantee I wouldn't come to a similar conclusion to Alexis by a different route. But at the VERY least, I think it's enough to discard part of Alexis's conclusions: if the rules language mess doesn't map a conditional vote attempt to another Option, I think R2127 is abundantly clear that it's still (retroactively, perhaps) a vote such that the default to PRESENT still works. So at the very least, I think conditional = PRESENT still works. [*] I believe there have been past CFJs that have been called during the voting period on whether a conditional vote was clear, with the precedent that the proper judgement is "currently INSUFFICIENT information as the voting period hasn't ended yet, call the CFJ again when the voting period ends". So, retroactive clarity.
