Chapter 3

Secession Actions

The Federal Voter Register is ready in time for the counties and states to petition Congress for a secession vote at the next federal election. The petitions are from twenty states and hundreds of counties, with a lot of the counties within the petitioning states lodging their own petitions too. The listings for the first secession vote are passed by Congress in a hurry so the votes can be made with the upcoming Presidential election.

There are too many county secession petitions to list all of the counties so a map of the USA is used below to show counties and states in the one image. The state legislatures that lodge secession petitions are:

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington.

Many people are shocked and surprised with the vote results when the results of the first secession votes are in, while many others aren’t surprised with the results. As is shown in the second map: in only two of the twenty states where the legislatures petitioned for secession do the voters in all of the counties support the secession movement, Hawaii and Massachusetts. Also, California and Vermont are the only states where half of the counties, or more, supports the state legislature in voting for the secession. Nearly all of the individual counties that lodged secession petitions have the voter support in the first secession vote of fifty-one percent of the registered voters or more. Blue is secession, red is union.

Map of the lodged secession petitions.

Map of the first secession vote results.

With the first secession vote results in a special team is selected to put together a list of proposed secession counties. All of the staffers who did the work on the Constitutional Amendment are on the team, plus others.

The initial work of the Proposal Team is to remove the counties that would be enclaves within the USA. This simplifies the map by removing a large number of the counties from the list. The team next evaluates the ability of the individual counties and county groups to function on their own. In most cases it’s easy to establish which counties will group together due to their need to have an International border, thus those whose only border is via a neighboring county have little choice in being grouped with the county with the International border. Where a county may have multiple choices they evaluate each of the mixes involved, and if any of those options proves viable the counties concerned are placed on the list of proposed counties. Several anti-secession counties are also on the list as they would otherwise be enclaves. Naturally, none of the local governing bodies for the counties being added to or removed from the list are happy about that happening to their county.

Within three months the list of proposed counties for the second secession vote is put to the Congress and passed by both Houses.

Map of the counties proposed for the second secession vote.

For months people are moving between counties so they can be in a county to suit their secession choice, many people flow in and out.

Secession Vote Lobbying

Due to the speed with which the Proposal Team worked there are a few months where people can move into a county and have their registration changed to allow them to legally vote in the second secession vote as the cut off is nine months prior to the vote. Anyone moving in after that can’t vote in the secession vote. Thus many of the secessionists from the counties not proposed are looking for housing and work in the counties where secession is proposed while many people who don’t want to be in a secession county are moving out of those counties to find work and housing in other counties. A few people set up businesses to help those who want to move by connecting people with similar work skills so they can swap jobs and homes to suit their preferred secession aims.

While all of the movement is going on people supporting both sides of the secession are lobbying with the other people in their area to vote the way they want it to go. This is because the first vote only required fifty-one percent of the vote, but the next vote requires sixty-five percent of the registered voters. So if enough vote against secession it will fail. Many of the people lobbying against secession stop doing so when they see the large number of people moving in and out of the counties, then they join the migration out of the county so they can stay US citizens.

The lobbying in Alaska is very different due to the economy of the state and the large number of workers in the oil industry in Alaska. The lobbyists against secession point out the major income for the north half of Alaska is the oil which flows down the pipeline with a large amount of it being sold in the USA. At the moment the source and the end of the pipeline are all in the one country and no duties or tariffs are applied to the sales to the USA. However, if the north secedes by itself then the oil has to cross an International border to enter the USA to reach the end of the pipeline and it will incur a hefty tariff to do so, thus increasing the costs to ship it. The only other choice would be to have a limited shipping period from the available ports on the northern Alaska coast which aren’t accessible for a lot of the year. They also point out a lot of the imported goods would come through the southern Alaska ports and would be dearer due to extra duties when shipped north. The result is a lot of the voters changing their minds about secession in most of Alaska.

Second Secession Vote Results

When the results of the second vote are in no one is surprised to find the vote in the bulk of the counties proposed are for secession, while the few major vote changes are in northern and western Alaska. Thus the only Alaskan counties to secede are the ones in the south-eastern counties including Juneau, Alaska, and a few of the counties adjacent to them.

With the vote in and the secession approved many federal, state, and local government bodies are soon very busy preparing for the passing on of control to the seceding counties. One of those tasks is to arrange for the special elections to replace the elected people in the Houses of Congress who have to resign due to having used their position to promote secession in their electorate and not having it happen, and to remove those who are no longer entitled to sit in Congress due to their seat ceasing to exist with their district either seceding or not having enough citizens to now warrant a seat due to part of the seat seceding. None of them are happy because they didn’t expect that to happen.

Map of the second secession vote.

The Changes

The general public doesn’t notice any immediate changes as most of them are not obvious or aren’t reported on by the media who are very busy going on about how great being out of the US Federal control will be. Those who have been actively against the US Federal Government and those actively supporting secession are in a state of euphoria.

There are few Federal Government changes due to the secession vote as the US military chooses to maintain their current operational bases in the seceded areas for the next two decades, while selling already closed bases. Many other Federal Departments and Agencies restructure their local operations while they move their offices out of the seceding areas. Only a third of the federal employees in the affected areas choose to move with their jobs, so they have to resign from their jobs.

The obvious changes at the Federal level are the restructuring of the Congressional areas affected by the secession vote and the vacating of the seats of those in areas that are seceding, along with those who supported secession but failed to get through the secession process. With the next obvious change being the Congress appointing temporary governors for the eight states that have to elect a new legislature.

The most obvious changes to the public at the state level are the replacement of the members of the state legislatures who supported and voted for secession but the state didn’t secede. Next is the work by state legislatures who have to move their state governments as they want to secede and the county doesn’t secede, or the reverse situation applies.

The legislatures who have to move are:

Delaware: to Wilmington in New Castle County;

Illinois: to Chicago in Cook County;

Maine: to Portland in Cumberland County;

Minnesota: to Duluth in Saint Louis County;

Nevada: to Las Vegas in Clark County;

New Mexico: to Las Cruces in Dona Ana County;

New York: to New York City in New York County;

Oregon: to Portland in Multnomah County;

Wisconsin: to Oshkosh in Winnebago County.

The most obvious business changes are the big corporations with operations in the seceding areas who arrange to move many of their activities out of the secession areas to non-secession areas due to them wanting to maintain selling the goods and services of those operations to the US Federal government as a preferred supplier. To do that within the existing US laws the services and goods have to be made and provided from within the USA. Thus the need to move those operations to areas staying within the USA. They have significant staffing issues as many of their staff had voted for secession and don’t want to move to live in the USA. This results in large staff shortages for the companies, and rising unemployment in the seceding areas the operations move away from.

Special negotiations take place between the US government and the Republic of Maryland to allow for the US government to retain the use of the buildings used by the US Federal government for the next ten years while they investigate alternate arrangements to move those operations elsewhere then to make those arrangements a reality.

While it is odd to have so much of the US government in buildings outside of the USA it’s just too difficult to move them all in the time set by the process in place. This does help in a way because most of the staff in those buildings live within the seceded area and won’t move. Thus a relocation will also mean a restaffing, which will take a lot of time to do.

The New Look USA

In the wake of organizing the new countries the states of Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont cease to be. Some state borders are changed due to negotiations with the new Federal Government appointed governors for the states that lost their state legislatures but stayed in the Union. All of the changes are listed below by their old state with the new countries in italics. The colors on the map are there to disassociate them from the neighboring ones.

Secession Final Splits

Alaska

Republic of Juneau - Haines, Juneau, Sitka, Skagway, Yakutat, Hoonah and Angoon as well as the adjacent Unorganized Borough areas.

Republic of Ketchikan - Ketchikan Gateway, Petersburg, Wrangell, Prince of Wales - Hyder, and the adjacent Unorganized Borough area.

Arizona

Republic of Tucson - Pima and Santa Cruz counties

California

Republic of California - Alameda, Alpine, Contra Costa, Fresno, Humboldt, Lake, Los Angeles, Marin, Mendocino, Merced, Mono, Monterey, Napa, Sacramento, San Benito, San Francisco, San Joaquin, San Luis Obispo, San Mateo, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano, Sonoma, Ventura, Yolo counties.

Southern California - Imperial, Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino, San Diego counties, and Clark County of Nevada.

Connecticut

Ceases to be and is part of the Republic of Massachusetts.

Delaware

New Castle County is part of the Republic of New Jersey.

Somerset, Wicomico, and Worcester counties of Maryland along with Accomack and Northampton counties of Virginia are added to the state.

Florida

Republic of Florida - Broward, Miami - Dade, and Palm Beach counties.

Republic of Tampa - Hillsborough County.

Georgia

Confederation of America - Baldwin, Bryan, Burke, Chatham, Glascock, Hancock, Jefferson, Liberty, Richmond, Taliaferro, Warren, and Washington counties, plus Allendale, Bamberg, Barnwell, Clarendon, Dillon, Farifield, Florence, Hampton, Jasper, Lee, Marion, Marlboro, Orangeburg, Richland, Sumter, and Williamsburg counties in South Carolina as well as Anson, Cumberland, Hoke, Richmond, and Scotland counties of North Carolina.