Ballot stock has to be ordered. Polling places in the corridor's districts have to be confirmed and staffed. Voter rolls for the defined portion have to be finalized against the NVS. All of that has lead time, and all of it is happening right now, on the strength of a scheduling certification filed in Month 10 that has not been withdrawn, amended, or superseded.
It also may not matter. That is the part nobody in this process can currently resolve.
The Provision Everyone Is Reading
§15.5.a(1) states that where two or more petitions affecting different defined portions of the same Territory are certified within ninety days of one another, the ordinary process for each is displaced and all of them are addressed together instead. Subsection (4) says what "addressed together" means: the underlying referendums do not proceed, and the Civic Consul convenes a Territory Convention.
Both Korda petitions were certified inside that window. The corridor's in Month 9, the whole-Territory petition in Month 11.
Read plainly, the Day 8 referendum stopped being a scheduled event the moment the second certification landed. Read equally plainly, nothing in the provision requires anyone to announce that, and nobody has.
The Panel's Position
The Elections Panel declined an interview. Its office provided a written response, which is reproduced here in full because its brevity is the story:
"The Panel administers referendums that have been certified. The certification of Year 13 Month 10 has not been withdrawn. The Panel has received no finding under §15.5.a. Preparations continue."
Every sentence in that is true, and together they describe an institution doing exactly what it is supposed to do while being unable to answer the only question anyone wants answered. The Panel certifies signatures and administers votes. It does not interpret §15.5.a, and nothing in the Constitution invites it to.
What Happens If Nobody Moves
The uncomfortable possibility is not that someone stops the referendum. It is that nobody does, and it happens.
Forty thousand people in the corridor would cast ballots. The Panel would count and certify them. And a result would exist, on the record, produced by a process a plain reading of §15.5.a says should never have reached a vote — with no mechanism anywhere in Article XV for un-holding a referendum that has already been held.
The Joint Monitor Council's procedural notice from earlier this month said it was reviewing the relationship between the two petitions and set no timeline for that review. Asked this week whether the review would conclude before Day 8, the Council's office said it had nothing to add to the notice.
That is not obstruction and it is not incompetence. The JMC is not obligated to move faster than it is moving, and it has not claimed otherwise. But four weeks is four weeks, and the ballot order does not care what anyone is still reviewing.