I'm actually annoyed it goes 'reverse if refused' on these options for electoral share. That doesn't make sense to me. Presumably Development would be gaining electoral share because its enacting policies popular with the people voting for Councilors, so I'm not sure how the proposals getting rejected would, in fact, shift balance to the other side. I guess it's because people think the other party would actually make it happen? Which means Pacifist voters are likely in favor of the Peacekeepers. This makes particular sense when you look at why Development would gain from the Expansionists if we are Logistics-independent, which seems a very Expansionist goal.
I'm going to take a highly contrarian view here on the Peacekeepers.
[X][PEACE] Go along with the deal
I think a lot of people are taking an old-school guy like Sulu too much at his word and mixing way too ideology into this. I think y'all are ignoring the harsh lessons of recent events too much as well to preserve a weird EU/Early United States conception of the Federation that frankly, just doesn't fit. We need to act like a Federation and not a Confederation.
We are seeing problems with the Caledonians having trouble keeping the peace, because the people they're peacekeeping are dissidents who hate the central government. The same goes for the Seyek and Fiiral. And while the Orions accepted the deployment of a bunch of member world units to their planet out of desperation, it's very hopeful that will be true in the future. It makes sense that they'll accept Starfleet as neutral mediators, and peacekeepers as exactly that -- neutral blue helmets to keep law and order and separate the two sides.
Starfleet has a good reputation. It's seen as neutral, it's full of every different species so you can't say it's biased one way or another, and it coordinates solutions to problems like this. As we expand, and more things like dissidents and subversive organizations like in the Caitian logistics corps come up, we're going to need a neutral organization that can be deployed to keep the peace and assist central governments in stabilizing. Ones that can assist in preventing things from spiralling out of control. We're going to have at least two outright problematic groups joining in the next few years -- Seyek and Caledonians -- and two possible problematics as well, the Orions and Gaeni. All of these possible members suffer from deep internal divisions, and pretending their central governments are going to be able to solve this when the internal division is often a mistrust in that is idealistic.
We need to look ahead to 2330, when we're going to have a shitton of new members who are new to this Federation thing and not the stable, norm-established and well-developed Original Four. Saying this isn't Starfleet's job seems naive -- we've basically been doing it ad-hoc for a long time, it's time to get serious about it because this will become a major, pressing issue. I am not at all confident that the member militaries of the Tellarites, Andorians, Amarkians, Humans, Vulcans, whoever are going to continue to be seen as sufficiently neutral for this purpose, nor do I think we should rely on them as a sort of leash on our power.
On the other hand:
[X][CARGO] Avoid
I'm opposed mostly due to the Expansionist loss. If it weren't for that, I'd vote for it. I think people are way too overblown about the ideological idea to keep the logistics corps under member control as another leash and I don't want to really open up the logistics system in general, so having N'Gir NPC-handle that for us works. I also suspect if we reject her here, we piss her off and then when we later do it anyways, as some are predicting, we'll just give her a delayed electoral boost anyways.
