Law vs bill

The words

Enacted law. Passed, signed, in force. It is governing people right now. Repealing it requires another law.

Bill. Language. Somebody wrote it. It may have been filed and may not; it may have been voted on and may not. It is not governing anybody.

Filed. A legislator formally introduced it. This is the moment a bill becomes part of the public record — it gets a number and a history.

Never allowed a vote. Filed, and then stopped before any vote occurred. Not defeated. Not withdrawn. Stopped, by somebody, at a nameable stage.

Why the movement is strict about this

Because the alternative is the thing we complain about.

A movement whose pages let readers believe our drafted language is law, or that a filed bill was enacted, is manufacturing exactly the kind of confusion it accuses others of manufacturing. And it would be fair for anybody to point that out.

The rendering rules that follow

A fix bill never shows a vote count. There was no vote.

A fix bill never shows a sponsor. There is none. If somebody files it one day, that is a different record with a different status.

A fix bill's status language is about drafting, never about passage.

A good law that was never voted on never renders as "defeated". It renders as what it is, with the stage it died at and who held it.

An enacted problem law never renders as a proposal, however much the movement dislikes it.

The one that is easiest to get wrong

"Never allowed a vote" reads, to a casual eye, like "voted down". It is not, and the difference is the whole point of recording it.

Voted down means the body decided. Never allowed a vote means one person decided for the body, and the absence of a roll call is the evidence of it rather than the absence of evidence.

A note on identifiers

Machine identifiers, routes and stored field names sometimes lag the language — a published URL stays routable forever, because breaking a link somebody shared is worse than an old word in a path. What binds is every rendered string a citizen reads.