Since we introduced our scorecards in late 2014, we’ve added several new features: links in comments, categories for bills, and individual vote management. This post will walk you through each new feature.
To start with go to the legislation tab, and click on the edit link to bring up the edit bill page. The edit bill page is where all of the new features we’ll be discussing in the post are located.
Links in Comments
Have a lot to say about a bill? Have you created a whole rubric to show how you came to your score? We’ve added a way for you to add links to your comment so you can share pages you’ve built or pdfs or other downloadable content you’ve created. For a great example see the Idaho Freedom Foundation’s Freedom Index – go to the legislation tab and check out their links.
To set up a link scroll down on the edit page. Below where you enter your comment you’ll see a place to add your link URL and your link text. The link URL should be the entire URL including the http; the link text is what you want to link itself to say. If you enter both a comment and a link, the link will be shown after your comment. Click save at the bottom of your page to save your work and see what your link looks like.
Let’s look at an example.
Entering the URL and text as above will display like this on your scorecard:
In this way, you can share as much supporting information about the bill or your score as you like.
Categories
If you would like to put your bills in categories so that you (and your readers) can see scores for just a subset of your bills, categories are the way to go. It takes a few steps, but they are all straightforward. To get started, you need to set up your categories for this scorecard. Creating categories is easy. Go to the manage tab and scroll down towards the bottom until you see the categories section.
To create a category simply type a word or phrase and hit enter. Your new category will be added immediately. You can remove categories you don’t need with the little x in the corner of the box. You can also come back to the manage tab and add new categories whenever you need to. You can create as many categories as you like, and a bill can be in more than one category.
Once you have categories created, they will be listed for you on the edit bill page. Below where you enter your comment and your link you will see a category drop down list. It will list all of the categories you’ve created on the manage tab. Assign one or more categories to this bill by choosing them from the list. You can remove a category from a bill by clicking on the little x. You can come back and add categories to a bill anytime.
The category(s) you’ve chosen will be listed on the legislation tab in the category column. As soon as you assign a category to at least one bill you will also see a drop down box appear on all of the other tabs. Choosing a category will change the tab to show only bills in that category, and will recalculate scores to consider only bills in the chosen category. By assigning categories, you and your readers will be able to focus in specific topicsmost, while still being able to see the overall picture too.
To avoid confusion, the categories the drop down list will only appear on your scorecard if you’ve designated categories to at least one bill.
Individual Vote Management
Normally when calculated a legislator score, we use their most recent vote weighted by the score you gave the bill. So if a legislator voted on a bill in committee, and then voted again on the house floor, we use only the house floor vote. However, sometimes you may want to exclude a certain vote for your own reasons. Or perhaps the language of your bill has changed so much that you want to give it a different score before and after the change. Or maybe, as with Rhode Island budget bills, votes are for individual sections of a bill, which you would like to score individually. In all of these cases, you’ll want to control the scoring for individual votes, and not just take our default setting of using the bill score and the most recent vote.
On the edit bill screen, scroll down to the bottom, and you’ll see all the votes for the bill listed in chronological order from newest to oldest. You’ll notice a calculator symbol in the last column to indicate which vote is being used in the score calculation (there will be one for each chamber). You’ll also see a drop down box to let you control how/if the vote is considered. Let’s step through each option.
Choosing “default” from the drop down leaves the system to choose the newest vote, and weight it by the score you gave the bill.
If you choose include then the vote will be included, even if it isn’t the newest. The rating box will become available for you to give a rating to be used for this specific vote. All the votes you Include will be included and count towards the score, even if you choose more than one. If you want to include a specific vote instead of the newest vote, include the vote you want and exclude all of the newer votes.
If you Exclude a vote you remove it from consideration for scoring, and the system will use the next newer vote (if any) for that chamber.
As always, please contact us if you have any questions about how to get the scorecard set up just the way you need it, or if you have suggestions for new features.
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