The Llama Award

The Llama Award is the one number on this site where higher is better. It counts what a named politician actually did to take democracy-damaging law back off the books, and to advance the law that repairs the machinery of self-government. It exists because an instrument that can only ever say worse things about people the longer it runs is a hit list, not a measurement.

One collection pass over the voting record feeds two price tables, which produce two awards that are always shown together and never combined into one figure.

What it does

The Llama Award is computed from the in-office voting record and nothing else: how a person voted at every stage, in committee and on the floor; what they authored or sponsored; and what they blocked from advancing. It runs over the same collected acts as the Monkey Award, through the same eligibility test and twelve-category classifier, and differs only in the price table applied at the end. One collection pass, two lookups.

Its curated set is the Good Law List. An instrument gets on it only if it does at least one of eight named things, and the entry has to say which: repeal or sunset a Monkey List item, restore a decision to the people's representatives, force transparency, remove an immunity from officials or contractors, harden the integrity of the vote, restore a court or a remedy, lift a penalty on lawful political speech, or return money committed outside ordinary appropriations back under that control. A bill the movement merely likes is not on it.

The two price tables are deliberately not mirror images, and that asymmetry is the whole defense of the number:

• Killing a repair in committee is priced at 0 at a weight of 30 — the heaviest weight anywhere in the product. Blocking the vote removes every other member's chance to be counted, so it is treated as the largest injury available.
• Authoring a repair is priced at 100. So is signing the discharge petition that forces a buried bill out of committee, and filing the amendment that strikes a harmful provision out of a must-pass bill — often the only act a member has available.
• An honest nay on a problem law earns full repair credit.
• One vote for a harmful law costs a repair record four times what it gains the damage record. Nobody can hold a strong Llama Award on a handful of consensus transparency bills while voting for every harmful authorization that comes through.

Outcome is not a term in the arithmetic. Filing a repeal that died in committee is priced identically to filing one that passed, because what is measured is what the person did, not what leadership allowed to reach the floor. A member whose only act is filing a repeal comes out at 100, with the act count published beside it so nobody mistakes one act for a career.

Every surface that renders the award says "higher is better" in words. Harm and repair are two separate awards and are never added into one figure, because a single combined number hides which half moved it. A politician's card leads with whichever of the two is larger, and the other is always shown too.

The goal it serves

The argument this movement makes is that too many people in Washington are working for somebody other than the citizens who elected them, and that the record itself will show it. The Llama Award is what makes the damage side credible — the same engine, the same acts, the same evidence bar, pointed the other way.

There is also a practical job nothing else here does. A citizen who wants a harmful law repealed needs to know who already filed the repeal, who signed the petition to force it out of committee, and who voted for it when leadership would rather they had not. Those people exist and are usually invisible, because a repair that dies in committee produces no headline. This is where a citizen finds an ally instead of an opponent.

The last reason is arithmetic honesty. Under an earlier design, voting against a harmful bill earned nothing at all — a movement whose own numbers told legislators that opposing bad law was worthless was arguing against itself. An honest nay is now counted on both sides of the ledger. There has to be something to earn, not only something to answer for.

What keeps it honest

Praise is constrained exactly as tightly as blame.

• The wall holds in the flattering direction too. Nothing outside the voting record can lift this award — not an interview, not a resume, not a public commitment. Those feed the Flamingo Award. A test fails the build if any of them moves this number.
• The Good Law List is not a list of laws we agree with. A tax bill the movement likes is not on it. The list is about the machinery of self-government and nothing else.
• An instrument may never sit on both lists. A collision is caught when the data loads, both entries are excluded, and it is reported — an engine that reads one bill as both harm and repair produces two contradictory claims about the same person from the same vote.
• It is not an endorsement. A high Llama Award puts nobody on a roster and triggers nothing automatically. Roster decisions are made by people, in public, with a written reason.
• It cannot launder a record. A high Llama Award never suppresses, shrinks, or annotates the Monkey Award. Both render in full, with their evidence tables, and the citizen decides.
• Absence is displayed, never counted. No eligible acts produces a state with its reason — "no legislative record", "no award yet" — never a 0 and never a blank.
• One row is openly contested. Whether a no vote on a bad law should earn full repair credit is an unresolved disagreement inside the project, and the counterargument is kept on the record with its issue number rather than quietly settled.

Works with

• The Monkey Award — the same collected acts through a different price table; the two are computed in one pass so they can be read side by side.
• The Whole Voting Record — the collection pass that produces the acts this award is priced over, every row linked to the official record.
• Show The Arithmetic — the derivation page behind each award, so the weights above can be checked act by act.
• The Wall — the rule that keeps everything except votes, authorship and blocks out of this award.
• The Flamingo Award — where the interviews, background and public commitments go instead, for the people who have never held office and have no votes to read.

Where to go next

• The Llama Award — the full area: the Good Law List, the table, and how to read a published derivation.
• Why it is not just the Monkey inverted — the asymmetric weights, in detail, with the reasoning published rather than hidden.
• Good Laws — the repairs that passed, the ones voted down, and the ones never allowed a vote at all.
• Where the data comes from — the official sources every act is cited to, and nothing else.
• Take Action — find the member who already filed the repeal, and give them something to carry.