“How did you ever manage that?”
“I allowed one hour for the voting, Chen Zufu, and I let it be known that the final votes would be published. Few people wanted to be a naysayer, and as the No votes dwindled, the pressure on the others to switch mounted. I waited a bit past the end of the hour, and when the last No vote fell, I locked the tally and declared an end to the voting.”
Matt chuckled.
“You have hidden assets, Madam Chairman. Well done. I didn’t even know you would be able to bring it to a vote this week.”
“Another manipulation, Chen Zufu. I called Piotr Boykov last night and asked him to call the question at the opening of this morning’s debate. I similarly asked Indira Bakshi to second. I suspected I had two-thirds to force closing the debate and moving to the vote.”
“And you had your two-thirds then, Madam Chairman?”
“That vote is by show of hands, Chen Zufu, and meeting the two-thirds requirement is in the chair’s judgment.”
Zielinski shrugged.
“I decided it was more than two-thirds,” she said.
Matt laughed.
“Very good, Madam Chairman. Well done. Now we must schedule the plebiscite on the charter, and the elections for government positions after that.”
Matt consulted the calendar in his heads-up display.
“We will have the plebiscite on the charter on Sunday, September eighth, and the elections on Sunday, December fifteenth. How did you handle the initial laying out of district boundaries, Madam Chairman?”
“It is up to the current head of state to draw the initial district boundaries. We left it to you, Chen Zufu.”
“And that’s still thirty districts, as you had it before?”
“Yes, Chen Zufu. Which puts ninety delegates in the Lower House, and thirty representatives in the Upper Chamber.”
“Very well, Madam Chairman. That is splendid work. You are to be congratulated.”
Matt spread his hands at his sides and bowed to her across the low table.
“Thank you, Chen Zufu. You are most kind.”
Matt sent a press release to the news outlets that evening, and the announcement of the plebiscite and election were made in the Friday morning news wires. They also published the Arcadia Charter.
Public debate on the charter started immediately. Most people were generally in favor of it, but most people also found something to complain about somewhere in the document. It was clearly much better than the situation they had been in before, where the council and its chairman had ruled without a structure.
Matt was busy supervising the drawing up of district boundaries. It seemed no one was able to do such a thing without trying to steer an outcome. How they even thought they could do that without any data from a previous election was incomprehensible to Matt.
Ultimately, he made many of the decisions. There were an average of fifty thousand inhabitants per district. The first thing Matt did was to make every outlying city over twenty-five thousand people and its environs its own district. One, with eighty thousand people, he made two districts, separating it and its environs down the middle of the road from Arcadia City, which was also its main street.
Matt whacked Arcadia City into quarters, with district boundaries along Quant Boulevard and Arcadia Boulevard. He then divided the quarters of the city into districts pretty much along what had emerged as main streets.
In the meantime, Matt and the Chen-Jasic family were gathering up a list of the main complaints they heard about the charter. Many of them were because people simply didn’t understand how bad all the alternatives were, or how badly those alternatives could be abused.
On Sunday, September first, with a week to go to the plebiscite, Matt addressed the citizens of Arcadia and addressed the major complaints they had heard, one at a time.
The economy was still strengthening under what wags were calling ‘the Chen Dynasty,’ the reforms and tax holiday Matt had put into place at the beginning of February. As a result, the Chen was very popular, and people trusted him.
While, in Matt’s estimation, the Arcadia Charter would always have received a strong majority of the vote, he wanted that majority to be as high as possible. He wanted the people to buy in, and the government to know how much support the charter had, so it would stay within its bounds.
After Matt’s speech that Sunday, support for the charter stiffened and grew. The public was settling into it now, and the debates that week included a lot of ‘Didn’t you listen to the Chen’ rebuttals.
The plebiscite on Sunday, September eighth, was orderly, the voting heavy.
When the votes were all counted, the Arcadia Charter had passed by a voted of 917,342 to 89,544, a bit over ninety-percent approval.
It was now time to settle down to the serious business of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Arcadia on Sunday, September fifteenth.
The Chen helped that along by declaring Thursday, Friday, Monday, and Tuesday planetary holidays, resulting in a six-day weekend.
Of course, some jobs needed to be done anyway, like tending farm animals and driving buses. But naming those days planetary holidays also resulted in time-and-a-half wages on those days for those who had to work.
The Chen family restaurant, of course, was open throughout the holidays. Some people were surprised to find the Chen himself waiting tables on some of the holidays.
“I gave my granddaughter the day off,” Matt explained.
He was just a regular guy, after all.
The story got around, and his popularity went even higher.
The Uptown Market did a land-office business in fireworks in the week leading into the holidays. On the evening of the fifteenth, the Chen-Jasic family put on the biggest fireworks display anyone on Arcadia had ever seen. They held it at the beach, and used a barge anchored offshore as the launching platform.
Officially it
