The Weight of History

The Problem

The New Mexico Business Coalition (NMBC) needed a multi-year rating system to educate their constituents on how legislators historically voted on bills and issues in their district especially important during an election year.  NMBC believes educated voters, when they can grade a candidate’s voting history, will take that knowledge to the polls and elect the best candidate during elections.

A large number of bills get introduced into legislative sessions during a short period of time in New Mexico and the legislative government website was not conducive to tracking the more than 4,000 bills in process. Having a platform that was more user- friendly than the government webpage and adding additional search parameters was needed to keep their NMBC’s constituents informed.

NMBC coalition is a 501 C4 social welfare non-profit organization for voter education that needed software automation to replace their laborious and time consuming Excel spreadsheets method. They chose BillTrack50 to simplify the process.

The Solution

New Mexico Business Coalition selected BillTrack50’s Scorecard tool to keep track of which legislators are working for their interests and which are working against them.

“We track critical and high-profile bills such as school expenditures, energy, public safety, wages and state control using BillTrack50’s legislative tracking tools. You can search a bill’s text by keyword, and get a summary list which includes information like when the bill was introduced, summary of the bill sponsors, the last action and a link to the official document on the legislature website,” explains Sonntag.

“To keep our constituents as educated as possible on their legislator’s policies, bills, and votes over time, we wanted to track more than just the current year of data, which is what a “traditional” scorecard does. So we asked Karen Suhaka of BillTrack50 to customize their scorecard to track multiple years for us, which went great. Now we can track three years of voting data for all legislators and share that information with our constituents for the upcoming 2020 election”

“Once the Scorecard is set up, we break down by category the different bills that we are following based on our priorities. We can also weed out the bills that are not relevant. We rate the candidates by their position on our priority bills from “A to F” based how good their positions are for jobs and business,” Sonntag adds.

The Results

 “We post the findings in real time to our web page. We then send updates by social media, ads, and email notifications to our constituents and lead them to our web page. In fact, a local candidate took our scorecard and posted it on their own feed saying they were proud of their score on our scorecard,” says Sonntag. “Our goal is to continually give the public knowledge and impact voter education.” 

Scorecard: NMBC tracking legislative voting by Pro-Market/Job Creator

View the NMBC 2018 General Elections Scorecard.

Karen Suhaka, founder of BillTrack50, beams “We are so proud to be able to help organizations like NMBC inform their members about how their legislators are serving them. Larry has done an amazing job promoting his scorecard and had a real impact in the state. I thought his idea for a multi-year scorecard was a little crazy at first, but I couldn’t be more delighted with how it turned out and the reception he’s received.”