There seems to be a misconception that it’s easy to “rig” a scorecard to achieve the desired result for the organization that creates it. I suppose if you rated the bills after the vote AND have a moving metric, it could be. If your metric evolves with how your favorite legislator votes, ok… They're riggable. But those two things have to be true.
However, if you have a metric that's clearly defined and explained, it’s impossible.
Our metric is the Idaho GOP Platform found here. The only time our metric will change is when the platform undergoes a change. We provide the reasons why each bill is rated as it is here.
Other organizations have their own specific metrics.
Here is how the Idaho Freedom Foundation rates its bills: here. And you can find the bills they’ve rated here, along with their reasoning for each rating.
Here is what IACI states is their metric: Vote in line with IACI position = +1 point. Vote out of line with IACI position = -1 point. Bills IACI is monitoring or maintains a neutral position = 0 points. You can find that on their scorecard page here.
BillTrack50 is the software that most organizations use to track and score legislation. It records all votes by legislators, both federally and by state.
Below are a couple of screenshots from my BillTrack50 account. The first shows the bill sheets, which are the bills we chose to rate. In our case, we included every bill that received a vote in the House, Senate, or both (excluding any bill that received a unanimous vote). We also did not include any memorials or resolutions.
In the BillTrack50 software, each organization has to choose which bills it wants to rate specifically.
Remember, we aren’t rating people, but bills. The IFF rated bills before the votes took place, so many of the bills they rated are ones we didn’t (because many of those bills never came to a vote).
Here is a screenshot of what our BillTrack50 dashboard looks like. These are the bills we've chosen to score. We chose to score every bill that came to a vote in either the House, the Senate, or both. We did not add any resolutions or memorials. We also chose to ignore bills that had unanimous up or down votes.
