BillTrack50 Help Center

Setting up a scorecard is simple, but there are some more advanced features which can make them an even more powerful tool. To configure scoring for an individual bill, go to the Legislation tab and click the Edit link on the far right of a bill:

Rename Your Bill

If the name of the bill is not very descriptive, or is too long, then you can give it a different name. This can make reading the Legislation tab easier, as well as improving the look of the individual legislator pages.

Score Sponsors and Cosponsors

As well as giving a score for the overall bill, you can also assign different scores for sponsors and cosponsors, to give them credit (or debit) for actually drafting the legislation.

Set a Category

If you have a lot of legislation, it may be helpful to assign a category to each bill. Then, when people look at the scorecard they can decide whether to see the legislator scores for all of the bills or just a particular category. The Category drop down menu is at the top of the Summary, Legislation, Bill Score and Vote Index tabs on the scorecard.

You can give a bill more than one category by clicking multiple options in the drop down menu. You will only have this option of you have first set up the categories on the Manage tab in the Scoring Settings section:

Type a word or phrase into the box and press Enter to create a category. Delete a category by clicking the 'x'. You can create as many categories as you like. 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.

Adding Comments

Have a lot to say about a bill? Have you created a whole rubric to show how you came to your score? You can add links to your comment so you can share pages you’ve built or PDFs or other downloadable content you’ve created.

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 '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 go to the Legislation tab to see what your link looks like:

In this way, you can share as much supporting information about the bill or your score as you like.

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.

Scroll down to the Votes section, 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, don't forget to click Save at the bottom when you've finished!