Reference Document
A complete, source-cited explanation of how Ohio Pride PAC arrives at every legislator's grade. Written for journalists, policy staff, candidates, donors, and members of the public who want to audit our work.
Section 01
The Ohio Pride PAC scorecard is editorial in nature: every component reflects considered judgment by our policy team about what a record on LGBTQ+ equality looks like in practice. We commit to four principles that govern every grade.
Primary sources first. Every roll call, sponsorship line, and floor statement we cite is anchored to an authoritative public record, with the chamber journal of the Ohio General Assembly as the canonical document. Secondary aggregators are used only for cross-verification and never to replace a primary source.
Transparent math. A composite score is built from three named subscores using a simple, additive formula that any reader can reproduce. We have deliberately avoided opaque weighting schemes that obscure how a number was reached.
Silence is not absolution. A legislator who avoids voting, refuses to take a public position, or routinely takes walk on contested LGBTQ+ legislation is recorded as such. Strategic absence is part of a record.
Correctable in public. We accept written corrections at any time. When evidence warrants, scores move, and the move is reflected in the next refresh.
Section 02
The scorecard covers all 132 sitting members of the Ohio General Assembly: 99 House members and 33 Senate members. Vacancies are noted but not graded. Members who serve only a partial term receive a partial-term notation alongside their grade. Statewide officeholders, judges, members of Congress, and local officials are out of scope; separate scorecards may be issued for those offices in future cycles.
Section 03
LGBTQ+ Ohioans do not live single-issue lives. A trans woman in Cleveland renting an apartment is affected by housing policy as much as by gender-identity statutes. A queer immigrant in Columbus is affected by language-access rules and ICE cooperation policies as much as by anti-discrimination law. A nonbinary teenager in Dayton is affected by curriculum censorship, by what their school nurse is allowed to say, and by whether their family can afford the trip to a clinic that will treat them. Limiting our scoring to bills with the words "LGBT," "trans," or "drag" in the title would systematically understate how state policy actually reaches our community.
For that reason, the bills we track and the votes we score reach across ten interconnected policy areas, each chosen because it materially shapes the daily lives of LGBTQ+ Ohioans:
This is not a claim that every bill in every category counts equally toward an LGBTQ+ scorecard. Bills that primarily affect our community on identity grounds, particularly in the first four areas above, carry the heaviest editorial weight in our tracked-bill catalog and therefore the most direct effect on the Floor Votes, Committee Votes, and Bills subscores. But a lawmaker who supports trans-affirming health care while voting to gut wage protections, restrict the franchise, or expand carceral policy is not, in any honest accounting, a full ally of the LGBTQ+ Ohioans whose lives those other policies actually touch. The intersectional lens is how we make sure the scorecard reflects that.
Each tracked bill is tagged with one or more of these ten categories on the legislator card. A reader who only wants the narrowest reading can filter to the first two; a reader who wants the full picture sees all ten.
Section 04
Each legislator receives three editorial subscores. Each subscore ranges from −5, indicating a consistent record against LGBTQ+ Ohioans, to +5, indicating a consistent pro-equality record. The subscores are independent and capture different signals, which is why we report them individually as well as in aggregate.
We chose three subscores rather than a longer list of weighted line items because every input is grounded in primary-source evidence and a transparent additive model is easier for journalists, candidates, and members of the public to audit than a black-box weighting scheme.
Earlier versions of the scorecard included a fourth subscore for on-the-record public statements: floor speeches, press releases, op-eds, and quoted remarks. We retired that subscore in April 2026. Quotes proved too easy to spin and too hard to weight consistently across lawmakers — a sympathetic press release in a friendly outlet and a hostile remark on a hot mic both arrived as "public statements" without a defensible way to compare their political weight. The score now relies exclusively on signals we can verify from the official chamber journal and the Legislative Service Commission: floor votes, committee votes, and sponsorship filings. Public statements still appear in our reporting and on candidate profiles, but they do not move the grade.
Section 05
The three subscores are weighted, added to a flat starting baseline of 50, and clamped to a 0–100 composite using the following formula:
where Vf is the Floor Votes subscore, Vc is the Committee Votes subscore, and S is the Bills (Sponsorship) subscore.
Every lawmaker, regardless of party affiliation, chamber, region, tenure, or caucus role, begins from the same flat baseline of 50. There is no party calibration, no chamber-relative adjustment, and no caucus bonus or penalty applied before the subscores are computed. A Democrat with no tracked activity sits at 50 (C / Mixed Record). A Republican with no tracked activity sits at 50. An Independent with no tracked activity sits at 50. The composite score a lawmaker ends the cycle with is driven entirely by the individual-level evidence that the three subscores measure.
This is a deliberate methodological choice. Any baseline that varied by party, caucus, or chamber would function as a prior verdict applied before the evidence. We treat each lawmaker as an individual public actor and let the record of their votes and sponsorships speak for itself. If a member of one party builds a pro-equality record while a member of the other does not, the scorecard will reflect that difference because the evidence does, not because the scoring model assumed it in advance.
Floor Votes (×4) and Committee Votes (×4) carry equal weight because both are binding action: a recorded yes or no on the bill itself. We track them as separate subscores so a reader can see each signal independently, but neither is more honest evidence of where a lawmaker stands than the other. Bills, the sponsorship subscore (×2), counts at half weight because adding your name to a bill is a public commitment of political capital but is not the same as a recorded vote on it. The weights are chosen so that a spotless +5, +5, +5 record reaches exactly 100, and a worst-case −5, −5, −5 record reaches exactly 0, without requiring the formula to clamp at the extremes.
A lawmaker who has not cast a recorded vote on any tracked bill and has not sponsored or co-sponsored any tracked bill holds the 50 baseline score and a C grade labeled "Mixed Record." The C is not a partisan penalty or reward. It reflects the factual state of the public record at the time of publication: we do not yet have enough evidence to grade the lawmaker higher or lower. As the legislative calendar produces new evidence, the composite moves in whichever direction the record takes it.
Section 06
When the Floor Votes and Committee Votes subscores are constructed, not every roll call carries the same weight. Higher-stakes procedural moments count more, while preliminary or amendment-only votes count less. Floor stages (passage, concurrence, override) feed the Floor Votes subscore; the committee-report multiplier feeds the Committee Votes subscore. Amendment and introduction votes are reported on the legislator's card but carry the lightest multipliers below.
| Stage | What it is | Multiplier |
|---|---|---|
| Veto-override | Roll call to override a gubernatorial veto | 1.25× |
| Concurrence | Concurrence vote on the second chamber's amendments | 1.00× |
| Final passage | Chamber-of-origin passage of the underlying bill | 1.00× |
| Committee report | Vote in substantive committee to report a bill | 0.75× |
| Amendment | Stand-alone vote on a floor or committee amendment | 0.50× |
| Introduction | Introduction or referral motion | 0.25× |
Section 07
Floor votes and committee votes are tallied independently and reported in separate sections on each legislator's card. We track committee action because legislation often lives or dies long before it reaches a chamber floor. Members who quietly hold a harmful bill in committee, or who advance a protective bill out of committee, deserve credit (or accountability) for that posture even when no floor vote ever materializes.
Committee chairs and ranking members carry an additional editorial responsibility on bills referred to their committee. We do not apply an automatic multiplier for chairmanship, but a chair's pattern of scheduling, refusing to schedule, or amending a bill in committee is part of the public record we surface in our reporting. Where that pattern is reflected in a recorded committee vote, it moves the Committee Votes subscore as well.
Section 08
Where a legislator's recorded vote diverges from their established pattern in a way that materially affects scoring, we publish a brief vote-exception note alongside the relevant roll call. This includes:
Vote exceptions are surfaced in the legislator's record so readers can understand the texture behind a single roll call rather than judging the member solely on a green or red dot.
Section 09
When sources conflict, the higher-authority source prevails. Our hierarchy, in descending order:
Cross-verification with Equality Ohio, TransOhio, and the ACLU of Ohio is used to flag inconsistencies for review, but their tracking does not substitute for our own review of the primary sources.
Section 10
Once the composite is computed, the letter grade is applied directly from the table below. The thresholds are fixed and apply uniformly across both chambers. There are no chamber-relative curves and no after-the-fact rebalancing of grades by party caucus.
Section 11
Every grade is reviewed at least quarterly by Ohio Pride PAC's policy team and refreshed when the legislative calendar produces material new evidence. Members of the public, legislators, and legislative staff may submit factual corrections at scorecard@ohiopride.org. We do not entertain disputes about editorial judgment, but we do correct factual errors quickly.
Where a legislator's office disputes how a vote has been characterized, we will publish a short note alongside the affected roll call summarizing the office's position. We do not remove primary-source citations.
Last reviewed by the Ohio Pride PAC policy team in April 2026.
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