The Monkey Award
The Monkey Award answers one question about one person: how much did they do to put a short, named list of democracy-damaging laws in place. It runs from 0 to 100, and higher is worse. Only acts of official power taken in a seat the person was elected to feed it, and the derivation is published line by line, so anyone with a calculator can reproduce it from the government's own record.
What it does
Two things go in. The first is the Monkey List: a small, hand-curated set of enacted instruments, or sections of them, each approved in a public commit. Twelve entries is a working list, and small is the design: two hundred would average the statute book, which says nothing about the laws that took representative democracy apart.
An instrument reaches that list only by passing at least one named admission test, and the entry says which: consent, representation, accountability, speech, franchise, due process, purse, or conscription. Each entry names an instrument and a section rather than a topic, and cites the official record. The Monkey List is not "laws we disagree with" — an instrument that checks no box stays off it however bad the policy is, and that sentence is printed at the top of the list.
The second input is one person's in-office record on those instruments: how they voted at every stage, what they authored or sponsored, and what they blocked from advancing. Nothing else. Every eligible act is sorted into exactly one of twelve categories — block, author, or vote; on a damaging instrument or on a repair; advancing it or resisting it; on the floor or in committee. Each category carries a published value from 0 to 100 and a published weight, and the award is a plain weighted average: multiply, add the two columns, divide once, round once.
The weights carry the argument. Blocking a repair from ever reaching a vote is the heaviest act here, value 100 at weight 30, thirty times a floor vote: a member who votes against a repair can be answered for it at an election; a member who keeps the vote from happening erases the record itself. Authorship sits at weight 20, and a committee vote outweighs a floor vote three to one, because there is no vehicle to hide behind in a markup. A floor vote for a damaging law is priced at 85, not 100: that is where the bundled must-pass bill gets its discount, once, in a published table.
Acts pointing the other way count at 0 and stay in the denominator, so an honest act pulls the average down. The calculation page carries the whole derivation with no sign-in: one row per act with its date, category, value, weight and source, then the column sums and the division. Add it up yourself; if a step disagrees, the page is wrong.
The goal it serves
The movement's claim is specific, not a mood: particular people used particular powers to put particular laws in place over a public that was never asked. The Problem states it without jargon. This award turns it into arithmetic, so the argument moves from whether we invented a number to a named instrument, its cited section, and the admission test its entry claims.
It also has to reach harm an ordinary tally cannot see: a chair who buries every disclosure bill filed in a decade never votes for anything harmful and comes out clean. Who kept a repair from a vote is public record too: see Who blocked it and the Problem Laws this list draws from.
The purpose of measuring is replacement, not commentary. Elections are the whole strategy for replacing captured incumbents, and a challenge needs more than a slogan: a dated act, a section number, a source link. None of it is taken on faith — the record is a repository you can clone and check.
What keeps it honest
- A 0 is a finding, not a compliment. It means we assessed this person against this list and found nothing advancing it.
- No eligible acts produces a state, never a number. "No legislative record", "No award yet" and "never in office while a list item was live" are different facts, and none is printed as a 0.
- A thin record is flagged. Below three counted acts the award carries a low-confidence marker.
- Gaps are published, not smoothed. An act with no link to the official record contributes zero and is listed as a gap, as are voice votes with no member-level record — a provision passed so that nobody could be held to it is a finding in itself.
- It never claims illegality, corruption, motive, or intent. It states what a person did, with a source, never what they are, and nothing happens automatically because a number crossed a threshold.
- Part of the eligibility test is not built yet, and the spec says so. A record is assessed once it matches an official voting identifier, but the check placing a person in office while each list item was live is unbuilt, so a former member who left before an item existed can still show a 0.
Works with
- The Llama Award — the repair side of the same record: same categories, same equation, over the laws that would fix democracy, where higher is better.
- The Wall — the rule keeping the voting record as this award's only input, enforced by a build test rather than good intentions.
- The Flamingo Award — everything the wall keeps out, assessed on its own evidence, and the only award a challenger with no legislative record can hold.
Where to go next
- The Monkey Award — the full area: what the award claims and refuses to claim.
- The Monkey List — the instruments, each with its admission test and citation.
- Problem Laws — the wider catalog of law the public never agreed to.
- Where the data comes from — the House Clerk, the Senate, govinfo, state sites.
- Find who represents you — look your own representatives up and read the record.