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1.This act shall be titled the Allowance of Motions During Voting Act.

Amendment
2. Section 4 of the Procedural Rules shall be amended to read:

4. Any Skrifa other than the Speaker may motion to vote on any proposal once the two-day debate period has expired. The Speaker shall open the vote no later than five days after the motion to vote has passed.

(a) During voting, any Skrifa may motion to alter the bill, and must then provide a detailed list of parts that need to be altered. If the motion receives a second, a vote will be held to determine if the proposed changes will come into effect, and the changes will only be brought into effect if a majority of Skrifa voted in favour of the action. If a draw occurs, the action will fail.

I think this has become necessary for productivity's sake. I'm not fond of my wording, so any suggestions are welcome.

EDIT: Fixed a typo pointed out by Colby in the Platform.

EDIT: Removed section (a) and renamed section (b), section (a).

I think this is necessary for an assortment of reasons, two big ones come to mind:

A) If changes were proposed and were never entered into the main post (the post that the Speaker normally pulls from), and the unchanged form reaches the bill.

B) If grammatical errors/typos are on the bill being voted on.

For A, it's really quite an obvious one because people might have reached an agreement with the changed bill, whereas they may have had many issues with the original one.

For B, as I said it to Chanku in the thread that was being scrutinized by Colby, I'd much rather not pass a bill with grammatical errors, only to have it come up once again by either the current or future session just to fix that error.  The less bills we have to continually re-visit to fix issues, the more we can spend on fresh new bills that need our attention.

However, I don't think we should be allowed to actually ALTER bills as in adding passages and the like...you know, things that SHOULD have been proposed in the Discussion thread.  If we allow practically any kind of alterations, then we won't get any voting done whatsoever because people will be bickering about other alterations they want to see.

This bill should be strictly kept to grammatical errors/typos, making sure the bill is what most of us originally agreed on, and making sure the bill isn't contradicting into something that would be considered illegal.

Then fail it and bring it back for a vote. Once it hits a vote it should not be changed. Grammatical errors should be caught before a vote. If the length of time that the bill had, especially the case of what we had, then the Underhusen failed it's job.

Says the one who said "it's" instead of its. 

Errors are easily missable, there's no reason to say we failed our job if we missed one after discussion ended.

Did anyone even notice that the bill on here had a [/u] sticking out at the end?

If we took this to a vote, would anyone really gripe about editing it out?

I highly doubt it, so asking for someone to fix a grammatical error during voting is perfectly alright with me.

And failing a bill just so we can go back in and edit a grammatical error/typo is a monumental waste of time.

I think I agree with Chanku. We should notice the errant bbcode tag or other typos before it goes to a vote.  I understand you were just using it as an example, but I would call any Underhusen that sent the bill to vote with a typo that flagrant as criminally negligent. I know that there are always going to be grammar errors that slip by, but we have extended debates and the 5-day cycle for a reason. Changing the bill during voting is preposterous.

Whereas I believe that it is unrealistic to expect an Underhusen to be flawless. The best we can hope for is that mistakes are eventually realised, and then fixed as soon as possible, but you have convinced me that it is a bad idea to change anything other than spelling and grammatical errors.

Whereas I believe that it is unrealistic to expect an Underhusen to be flawless. The best we can hope for is that mistakes are eventually realised, and then fixed as soon as possible, but you have convinced me that it is a bad idea to change anything other than spelling and grammatical errors.

Laurentus hits it on the head right here.

You're expecting the Underhusen to be flawless, infallible.  I argue that we're not that, and we shouldn't expect to be such.  When we bring laws to a vote that have errors that weren't noticed earlier, they need to be fixed, otherwise some of those errors can come back to haunt us.

I'll use EVERY law that we've had to re-update and fix errors due to vagueness in wording, and laws that cleaned up the language because the structure was off.

How much do you think having to re-update and re-fix every single law that was missed would have gotten to be avoided if we allowed people to suggest modifications to fix those errors during voting?

The voting process should be when we close off suggesting new passages or altering passages, as the time for discussing actual changes to the law itself are long since passed.

However, the time for fixing errors in wording, typos, sentence structure, and other grammatical errors should have no end.  If someone sees an error in that form, it should be allowed to be fixed at any time WITHOUT having to fail an entire bill just because of one error, and without having to waste time introducing yet ANOTHER bill to fix an error.

Hell, we went through 3 different bills so far just for the Speaker Pro Tempore requirement.  One to set it up, one to add a single word, and then one to change that word into a time limit.

Do we really need to continue doing that when there are more precious bills out there that haven't even gotten one run through compared to, say, a procedural rules amendment that has gone through 5 different cycles?

And that's all I'm really suggesting (the others I was never completely sold on, but grammatical/typos are essentially the main issue).  If we can clean up a bill and keep them free of errors, even during voting, then I don't see why we shouldn't allow it.

Where do you draw the line between structural change and grammatical change?  A change that seems simple could have unintended consequences that we don't notice at the time because the process is rushed and there's a desire to get this shit fixed quick. The example you bring up is an excellent point. Going from 7 days to 168 hours is significant as far as the meaning if the law is concerned. We had to go to trial to even realize the extent of that and fully flesh out the arguments on both side. You think that whole process - the brainstorming, critical thinking, analysis of ideas, finally implementing them - can be achieved during voting?  The process I just described is exactly what is supposed to happen during the drafting process.

Alright, you have convinced me. It seems this is simply one thing where productivity should take a back-seat to quality discussion. Although I will point out that the voting period is not short...

That's not always true. If everyone (or even 3 people) are online, the process can be finished in a half hour.

That's his point.  30 minutes isn't short, and neither is 2 days.  In just one day everyone should be able to come on and vote, but we give 2 just in case.

It is currently past the deadline, so if someone would like to make a motion...

I cringe at the inefficiency, but I have been persuaded that inefficiency is a lesser evil that the consequences this act could bear.

As such, I motion to table.

A motion to table has been made.  Do we have a second?

Second.