Scoring Legislative Votes

See each district for the last 3 sessions and how accurate are the scores?

Once the session concluded, we went through each district and pulled each district's scores for the past 3 sessions to essentially see how the legislators this year stacked up vs past sessions. We posted them on social media but also to our website where you can find your district and see for yourself.

All of these scores come from the Idaho Freedom Foundation. You can find their "metrics" here.

From what we can tell, the IFF has always come under fire for their metrics. But mostly from the left and the RINOs. Before the IFF showed up, the RINOs were herding together without any accountability. Now we can see that things have been changing especially seeing how good this past session ended up being. 

However, it now seems like even conservatives want to avoid accountability because most of the new criticism seems to be coming from a few people on our side. Granted, I think any org that keeps scores, needs to be held accountable for whatever their metrics are just like legislators need to be held accountable for their votes. No one org is perfect, not even Stop Idaho RINOs. 😂

This past session alone, SIR has disagreed with probably 2-3 of the IFF ratings (that we are aware of...there could be more). However, IFF is still the leader in scoring legislators. They not only score on a conservative scale, but they also score the most bills by far. In fact, you could probably add up all the bills that other orgs score, and IFF would still have scored more bills than all of them combined. The picture their rated bills create is the most accurate overall picture any org can paint of our legislature.

So why are conservatives now going after IFF? Well we aren't going to speculate on the why. That's their deal. But we will say this... there are still far too many RINOs, moderates, and liberals in office in Idaho for these factions and this fighting to continue. 

As conservatives, we need to collectively start backing all of our conservative legislators whether or not we agree with them 100% of the time. Let's do this whole "faction" thing once we get all of the RINOs out... but until then, let's unite and support each other.

About the scoring system...

SIR has actually looked into this bill scoring software in the past. Many scoring orgs use "BillTrack50" which allows you to score bills and then once the vote gets inputted by Bill Track, the score is recorded automatically. Where it gets extremely difficult is when the same bill gets voted on multiple times because of multiple amendments. That was one of the reasons why SIR, a very small org, decided against scoring anything (the goal was a GOP scorecard). We knew we couldn't do it justice. This is also why many orgs only score a few bills, unlike the IFF. 

We don't envy the work that IFF has to do in order to get the scores as accurate as possible. They will ALWAYS have detractors whatever they do and however they do it. 

We used to be a "why don't you just score the bills after the votes" type of mentality... until realizing how that would be the #1 way to rig the system. If you didn't like a particular legislator, or group of legislators, you could just set the rating based on how that legislator (or legislators) voted on several bills to tank their scores. But doing it beforehand prevents any type of bias (other than the pre-decided metrics) into the scoring. It is 100% up to each legislator to look at the scoring beforehand or not (and vote accordingly). They aren't forced to.

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