About legislator scorecards

A legislator scorecard grades each member of one legislature, for one session, on the bills your organization took a position on. You choose the bills, say whether you support or oppose each one, and decide how much each counts. CapitolMath reads every member's recorded floor votes on those bills and works out how often, by weight, they voted your way.

Scorecards live under Scorecards in the Tracking menu.

What a score means#

A score is the weight a member earned divided by the weight they could have earned, on a scale of 0 to 100. A member earns a bill's weight when their recorded floor vote agrees with your position. A score of 75 means the member earned three-quarters of the weight that was open to them.

The weight counted is only the weight of the bills that member had a chance to vote on. A bill that never came to a floor vote in their chamber, or came up while they weren't seated, is left out of both sides of the division. Nobody is marked down for a vote their chamber never held. A legislator's arithmetic walks through one score line by line.

Each score also carries a letter grade, read from fixed grade bands, and the results write the bands out above the grades.

What a score doesn't mean#

• It isn't a measure of ideology or party. It measures agreement with your positions on these bills. For where a legislator sits on the economic and social scales, see Political lean scoring.
• It counts floor votes only. Sponsorship, committee votes and speeches don't enter it.
• It can't be compared across scorecards. Two scorecards with different bills, weights or rules measure different things, even for the same legislature.
• No score isn't a low score. A member who could be scored on too few bills shows insufficient record instead of a number. See the minimum.
• Party is today's party. A member who switched party during the session is listed under the one they hold now.

The only judgment call in the arithmetic is how to treat a member who was present but didn't vote. You choose one rule for missing votes, and the scorecard states it in plain words.

Built to be checked#

A scorecard makes a claim about named people, so every part of it can be checked. Select any legislator to see each bill, their recorded vote, the roll call it came from, the weight and the running total. The Methodology tab writes out the scorecard's rules from its settings, so the description can't drift from what was computed. Votes come from the official roll calls as the legislature published them.

Who builds and who sees#

Building or changing a scorecard takes a Full license. A scorecard is shared the way a saved view is: whoever creates it owns it, and can share it with everyone in the organization, with groups or with members, to view or to edit. Owners and Admins can reach every scorecard in the organization. See Sharing and access.

A scorecard stays inside your organization until an Owner or Admin puts it in a widget for your website. See Putting a scorecard on your website.