Idaho's First AI-Generated Legislative Scorecard Explained

(And who paid for it?)

A little over a week ago we unveiled our legislative scorecard. We rated 316 bills which was every bill that was voted on in either the House, Senate, or both with the exception of bills that received unanimous support or opposition. 

What we did not tell you during that unveiling was that our scorecard is 100% AI-Generated. For several years now we, and others, have tried to rate bills with AI. We failed each time because AI just wasn't there yet. It couldn't properly analyze the Idaho GOP platform and then compare bills to that platform... until now.

We were finally able to successfully train artificial intelligence to do both (read the platform and compare it to each bill)... and not only that, it could challenge itself, its own rating to make sure it got it right. While we won't get into specifics on how we did this, we can promise that AI rated each bill very accurately because we had fail safes included in our AI training. Each bill's rating is explained here.

Why AI? If you've been paying attention, the leader in legislative analysis and ratings across the nation has been the Idaho Freedom Foundation. They do solid work for Idahoans. Because they've been so "over the target," they've been repeatedly accused of "rigging" their ratings to make some legislators look good and others look bad. They rate the bills prior to each vote for all to see beforehand. One would think that it would be much easier to rig if the rating happened after the vote wouldn't it? 

Either way, with AI, the human emotions and bias are taken out of the rating process. Each bill is rated in black and white, with only the Idaho GOP Platform as its guide. The AI that we trained had no outside sources to look at except for the platform and the bill. It had no knowledge of how the vote ended up or how each legislator voted. It simply gave us a +1, 0 for neutral, or a -1. It then gave us a long printout of why it came to that conclusion. It then challenged its own rating, and finally, it gave us the final conclusion along with a summary. Because we are a small operation (and we want to protect the work we did in training our AI), we only posted the summary on our site, not the whole process.

After we released our scorecard, we created quite the frenzy and were contacted by numerous people asking if this was officially from the Idaho GOP despite us specifically saying it was not. We also have a clear disclaimer on the bottom of the website saying, "We are not affiliated with the Idaho Republican Party but are an independent organization reviewing legislation and using the platform of the Idaho Republican Party for the ratings."

We think it would be great for the GOP to get behind our scorecard, but seeing those in GOP leadership continually vote to increase the size of government, not by just a little, but by a lot, we won't hold our breath. (See their scores below)

Who Paid for this?

We've seen accusations on social media of someone or an entity paying for this scorecard to be built in an attempt to discredit it. So we'll address that here in full transparency....

Nobody! 

This scorecard is done solely by Stop Idaho RINOs using the very small donor dollars that we receive throughout the year to cover any technology costs which are very minimal. We've done this entire scorecard on a shoestring budget and that includes the cost of the plugin to use on our website to display the scorecard. We were actually able to have AI create the plugin for us saving us thousands of dollars per year!

There is an ongoing cost to maintain the scorecard since it ties into a nationwide company's API but we expect to be able to continue to pay for that with the generous donations of you, our supporters.

Reminder: This scorecard DID NOT rate any legislator. It only rated legislation. The legislators just receive a grade based on their specifics votes on the legislation that was rated. 

GOP Leadership:

Senator Kelly Anthon - Senate Pro Tempore

Lori Den Hartog - Senate Majority Leader

Mike Moyle - Speaker of the House of Representatives

Jason Monks - House Majority Leader

www.idgopscorecard.com

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