This came up in my game last night.

The Nekro Virus played their Rep that says Name a Player and an Outcome. If the player Votes for that Outcome, the Nekro Virus copies one of their technologies. The player he named was the Speaker and the Outcome was Motion Passed. As voting went around, when it got to the Speaker it was tied. The Speaker then abstained and the vote was tied. He then used his power as the Speaker to break the tie in favor of passing. The Speaker said he did not vote either way for the outcome, he just broke the tie, thus the Nekro Virus could not copy one of his Techs. The Nekro Virus player was understandably miffed at this and claimed that the Speaker's Tie Breaking ability counted as voting.

Does the Speaker's Tie Breaking ability count as voting? And if it does, what happens if the Nekro Virus is Speaker and has to break a tie as they are not allowed to vote on political cards?

digdoug said:

The Speaker's tie-breaking ability is not a vote. It sounds like the Speaker player found a very clever way around letting the Nekro get their tech on in this particular case. Before crying foul about this, consider that it does require the voting to be exactly tied by the time it gets around to the Speaker - something that the Speaker himself has little if any control over. Firstly, there must be a way to divide all the votes other than the Speaker's evenly, which may not be possible as every player is required to cast all their votes (you can't split your votes.) Secondly, the number of votes each player has is variable depending on which planets he has face up when the vote occurs. Finally, even if there is a way to set it up, the Speaker would need to convince everyone else to go along with it somehow. All this just to spite the Nekro player one tech? I don't foresee this particular situation arising too often.

As the tie-breaker is not a vote, the Nekro could presumably use it normally despite his racial inability to vote. That said, I could also see a house rule about not letting the Nekro have any influence in politics and therefore having next player in initiative order use that tie-breaker instead of the Nekro if he is Speaker. That's entirely a house rule, of course.

digdoug said:

I do not have the box yet (takes ages to deliver it to russia) but this particular question and many others can be resolved according to the exact wording of the card. The card says: copy 1 tech if player voted as you predicted. So player can always vote 3 ways for a normal law and n+1 votes when "elect player" political card is resolved (where n = number of players). Those votes can be: For, Against and Abstain, so player who uses this ability should always consider this. The rest is described in Steve-O's post above.

In many cases the text of the card itself answers many questions.

I agree with Steve-O. Using the Speaker ability to break a tie is NOT voting. It is just breaking the tie. There are a few other situations where that could happen with certain laws, too.