Keep track of which legislators are working for your interests, and which are working against you. Our scorecard tool lets you choose a set of bills and rate them, and then we’ll tally up votes and show you the results. Legislator scores are presented in several interactive displays: an interactive bar chart, a grid of detailed results, and color coded district map. We will host this page for you, or you can embed it right in your website.
The first tab shows an overall summary of the legislator scores. You can click on any column to sort by that column. You can also use the filter button to narrow by party, chamber, or score range (for example, you can enter “<0” in the score filter to see only legislators who have negative total scores).
The second tab is legislation, which shows the basic information for the bill along with your rating and explanation. We keep the bill title and latest status updated so you always have fresh content. Also, you can click on the bill number to read more about the bill, giving you deep content.
You can use the edit link to change the rating or comment any time you like. (Your readers will not see the edit link or the manage tab.)
The vote record tab shows complete details about the legislators score and how it was calculated.
You can click on any legislator name to see their details, including their contact information.
The party index tab shows a ranking of who agrees and disagrees with you most, color coded by party. You can hover over any bar to see which legislator is being represented by that bar.
Finally the House and Senate tabs show some statistics broken out by party, as well as a heat map of which parts of the state agree and disagree with your agenda. This example is from Kansas:
Setting up your scorecard is easy. You simply create your scorecard, choose some bills, and then rate them. We take care of everything else, and keep your scores updated daily.
First, create your scorecard. Go to the new scorecard tab on your dashboard, and then push the new scorecard button.
You will be asked to choose a state (or choose United State for Congress). Scorecards can only be for a single state (or Congress). If you would like to keep an eye on several statehouses you will need to make separate scorecards for each. You then step through the usual purchase process; an unlimited number scorecards are $500/year if you already have a BillTrack50 legislation subscription.
Second, choose some bills to rate. After creating your bill sheet you will find yourself on a simple search screen. You can look for bills by bill number, or using search terms. Enter what you are are looking for, and push the search button. You will be given a list of matching bills; choose the one(s) you want a push the + button to add them to your scorecard. You can add multiple bills at once.
When you are finished click done and you will be taken to the next step: rating bills.
You can go back and add new bills to your scorecard at any time. Simply go to the scorecard tab, choose the scorecard you want to add bills to, and go to the legislation tab. You’ll see an add bills button, which will bring you back to this search screen.
The third and final step is to rate your bills. When you first add bills to your bill sheet they will have a default rating of 0. Click the edit button next to the bill you would like to rate and you’ll be taken to the rating screen
You can rate a bill on any scale you choose, using any reasonable integer. We suggest giving bills you support a positive score and bills you oppose a negative score, for the tool to work best. You can also enter a comment to explain why a bill got a particular rating. If you would like to link to a document or other supporting materials, fill in the Reference Link URL and Link Text boxes. Your link will be added to whatever you have in the comment box. You can also have some control over the scores by choosing to exclude certain votes, if needed.
That’s it! We’ll tally scores every night. If a legislator votes yes on a bill you gave a 2, they will get 2 points. If they vote no on that bill they will get -2 points. Similarly, if they vote yes on a bill you gave a -5, they will get -5 points. And if they vote no they will get 5 points. By default we score the most recent vote on that bill for that legislator, including committee votes (again, you can exclude certain votes if you need to).
All that’s left is to share your scorecard. Simply go to the manage tab, scroll to the bottom, and click the “Make this stakeholder page public” checkbox, and you will be presented with two links. If you simply want to share a link and have us host the page for you, use the first link. If you would like to embed the scorecard use the second link.
For advice on advanced features like assigning categories to bills, or controlling how individual votes are used in the score, please see this advanced features blog post.
Please contact us if you have any questions or need any help getting your scorecard set up.
About BillTrack50 – BillTrack50 is a user friendly free service that provides legislation research in all 50 states and federally. BillTrack50 also offers legislation and regulation tracking across the nation with tools to help organization stay on top of changes (bill sheets and alerts) and share legislation they are tracking with key stakeholders (legislator scorecards, widgets and stakeholder pages). If you are interested in learning more about how BillTrack50 saves organizations time and money, sign up for a demo and try it out BillTrack50 Pro for a month, for free.