Join the new world

To everyone who voted up the last article, commented both sub-article and in the forums, I appreciate your time and input. The topic was debated, tossed around, baked in a glazer’s oven, passed through Scrabman’s intestinal tract, and has emerged the other end one of the finest cubic zirconian specimens yet: The Congressional Report.
What this means for you is that this newspaper is now exclusively devoted to reporting congressional activities and voting trends to the general public. If it is of importance to you to be informed of what is going on in Congress you have two choices: Either subscribe to the forums or subscribe to this newspaper.
REGARDING CONGRESSIONAL FORUMS AND CONGRESSIONAL ACTIVITY
The congressional forums at www.erepublikusa.com are where most of the legislation discussion and debate takes place.

If you are a congressperson please note: one of you (I won’t say who) has been complaining about the fact that you are “being forced” to get on the forums for congress. The forum is free, easy to use (easier imo than the official forum) AND although there is nothing in-game requiring you to register for this forum (which means that technically nobody can force you to) you should be aware that:

A- Congress has devised a system called the Pre-Planned Proposal Policy, which requires that all law proposals be posted on a forum thread for discussion before actually proposing the law in-game. The purpose of this system is to keep Congressmen from wasting their valuable proposals (since we only get two each, per term!) on laws that aren’t properly thought through or discussed. It also allows for the issues to get properly hammered out in a public forum; much like watching CSPAN 

B- Because the overwhelming majority of Congress is on the forum and supports the PPPP, you can rest assured that, if you propose a law in eRepublik (which you have every right to do as a Congressman… but only twice per term) without running it through the PPPP system it WILL be voted down, regardless of how good of a law it is. So do it twice and you’ll be sitting on your thumbs for the rest of your term. If you want to get things done, work within the system.

If you are NOT a congressperson, but you want to get involved in the forums you are HIGHLY ENCOURAGED to do so! The more involved you are, the more success you will have in this game.

REGARDING THE CONGRESSIONAL REPORT CARD (creating a transparent voting record)

I have been sifting through the forums tallying up votes and trying to educate lawmakers on how to properly post their votes so that they can be tallied. Here is how the congressional report cards work:

1- Congress members follow procedure to cast their votes in the forum first, via the PPPP described above. When the proposal has achieved 5 votes of approval or more it is considered to have a higher likelihood of passing. At this point it is officially proposed in-game, and 24 hours are given for the voting to take place. CURRENTLY (we hope eventually the admins will address this) there is no way to tell who showed up to vote, OR how they voted. The only data available in-game is the number of YES votes vs. the number of NO votes.
2- When the law is officially proposed in-game the proposer or “sponsor” of the bill is supposed to attach a link to the “debate area”. (Erepublik is DESIGNED to have external forums for the discussion and debate of laws) In this case, the link is also being used as an easy access for Senators to link DIRECTLY to the forum thread where the voting is being tallied.

3- By linking to this area, Senators can cast their votes “for the record”, for example I would place a post that says “VOTE YES Joshua Tree Virginia. This allows me to go through the thread and quickly summarize who voted, how they voted, and what state they represent.

4- I then compile this information into a summary and publish it in this newspaper. This is for the benefit of the citizens: If you do not know what your congressman did, how he voted, or even IF he showed up to vote half the time, how will you know how to cast your own vote come time for re-election? How many people ran for office in a sparsely populated state knowing they could win with a multi-account or two, collect their 5gold for winning, and then sit on their thumbs for a month waiting to do it all over again? Hopefully nobody, but the truth is folks we have a number of people who have been inactive, and it’s starting to look like it’s the same few folks over and over and over.

The following is a list of Congresspersons who have not yet registered on the forums. If your name is listed below, and you have some sort of objection to getting on the forums, please PM me in-game to work something out.

MascaraVerde Massachusetts
Desert Falcon Missouri
td wester Idaho
starrysothoth Minnesota
DragonKnight Arizona
Roamin Kansas
Illig INC Nebraska
Targumjoe Connecticut
Mostofa2000 New Mexico

If you live in one of the states listed above, please contact your senator and express to them the importance of having a transparent voting record.


I will be publishing the report card in the very next article. Please subscribe if you want to stay in the loop.

Regards,

Jtree
Virginia Senator