What counts as a vote

Three kinds of act

A vote. They voted, at a recorded stage, and the roll call says which way.

An authorship. They wrote or co-sponsored the instrument. This is a stronger claim about responsibility than a vote — the instrument exists partly because of them.

A block. They kept something from advancing. → Blocked from a vote

Stages, and why they are weighted

A vote is not one thing. An instrument passes through stages, and a vote at each carries a different amount of information about the person casting it.

A committee vote is cast by a small number of people whose votes are decisive and less observed. A floor vote is one among hundreds and heavily reported. Weighting them identically would misrepresent both.

Vehicles — recorded, and kept out of the arithmetic

Consequential provisions frequently arrive inside instruments nobody can vote against: a defence authorisation, an appropriations package, a must-pass continuing resolution.

The vehicle class is recorded and shown to the reader, because a citizen deserves to know that a yes vote was a yes on a package that also funded the government.

It does not enter the equation. The moment it does, every award becomes an argument about how much benefit of the doubt a package earns — and that argument has no floor and no resolution. So: visible to the reader, absent from the arithmetic.

The classification

Every act is sorted into exactly one of twelve categories, formed by crossing what they did (vote / author / block), which side the instrument is on (problem / good), the direction (advancing / resisting), and where it happened (floor / the small room).

Twelve rather than four exists because of the role-inversion trap: the same verb means opposite things depending on the instrument. Blocking a problem law is good. Blocking a repair is very bad. The instrument's side is therefore part of the category rather than something inferred afterwards.

Fact vs reading, one more time

Which way somebody voted is a fact. Whether that vote advanced or resisted the harm is the movement's judgment — recorded in its own explicit field, so a reader can accept the first and reject the second.