When setting up a scorecard, you give a bill a score; a positive number if you like the bill, and a negative if you don’t like the bill. Then we take each legislator’s vote, look at your score, and add it all up to show you which legislators are working for you and which are working against you.
Great! But what if your legislator didn’t vote? And argument can certainly be made that by not voting (absent or abstain), they helped the vote turn out the way it did. Perhaps you’d like to give them partial credit (good or bad) for that vote. Or maybe even full credit, if legislators missing votes really ticks you off.
We’ve added a new section to the scorecard manage tab called Absent or Abstain:
You simply enter a percentage between 0 and 100, and we’ll give the legislator partial credit for non-votes. If the vote passed we’ll score them like they voted Yes, and if the vote failed we’ll score them like they voted No. The default percentage is 0, so if you don’t enter a number, non-votes won’t effect the final score. You can set different scorecards to have different amounts of partial credit, depending on your needs.
We hope you find this new ability helpful.
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.