How We Score Ohio’s Legislators

Score Weights (v2.1 — SQL-backed intersectional)

Every legislator is scored across four dimensions. Floor votes carry the most weight because a recorded vote is the clearest measure of how a legislator behaves when the moment of decision arrives. Sponsorship is weighted up in v2 to reward members who drive the bills that protect our community, not just those who vote on them when someone else puts the question. Committee votes are tracked separately so members who stop bad bills in committee, or advance good bills out of committee, get credit.

As of v2.1, all four inputs are resolved from the Supabase bills / roll_calls / legislator_vote_exceptions tables rather than a hand-maintained spreadsheet.

Event Weights

Inside each category, not every vote counts the same. Higher-stakes events are weighted up; procedural or amendment-only votes are weighted down. These multipliers live in EVENT_WEIGHTS in /js/voting-records.js and in the roll_calls.stage column comment in Migration 4.

• Veto-override roll call: 1.25×
• Concurrence or final passage: 1.00×
• Chamber-of-origin passage: 1.00×
• Committee report: 0.75×
• Amendment-only vote: 0.50×
• Introduction / first reading: 0.25×

Data Pipeline (what the SQL database does)

As of April 22, 2026 the scorecard is backed by Migration 4 (supabase/migrations/20260424000000_scorecard.sql), which persists three tables the public scorecard reads over the anon role:

• bills — the catalog of tracked bills. Each row carries an editorial stance of anti, pro, or mixed. Stance drives scoring direction: on an anti bill, a Y vote subtracts points and an N adds them; on a pro bill the signs flip. Mixed bills are tracked but never auto-scored.
• roll_calls — one row per recorded legislative action (committee, amend, pass, concur, override, introduce). Each row records the chamber, stage, vote date, tally, and the event weight that applies.
• legislator_vote_exceptions — one row per member who broke from their party-line default, or whose NV / E was hand-recorded. The resolver falls back to the party-line default for every other member, so only crossovers need an exception row.

The final per-member impact is the product of three values: stance direction (from bills.stance), resolved vote (exception row if one exists, otherwise the party-line default), and event weight (from the stage multiplier above). Legislators who were not seated at a roll call’s vote date resolve to - and are filtered out so only votes that actually mattered to that member count against them. The dataset covers both the 135th GA (HB 68, HB 8, SB 104, SB 1 135th, HB 602 135th) and the 136th GA (HB 249, SB 1, SB 34).

Resolution order

1. If an explicit legislator_vote_exceptions row exists for this member and roll call, that row wins.
2. If the member was not seated on the vote date, the roll call resolves to - (ineligible; not scored).
3. Otherwise, the party-line default applies (R→Y on anti bills, D→N on anti bills; signs flip on pro bills).
4. Independents and mixed-stance bills resolve to NV and are flagged for manual review.

Verification Status

Every roll_calls row carries a verificationStatus flag. Migration 5 (daily verification) extends this into the database schema itself; until then the flag lives in the JS editorial layer.

• verified — tally matches the chamber journal of record.
• provisional — committee clerk or press report, not yet cross-checked against the journal. Scored, but reviewed daily.
• reconciled — the row was previously provisional and has since been reconciled with the journal. Treated as canonical.

Intersectional Framing

LGBTQ+ equality cannot be separated from racial justice, reproductive freedom, voting rights, disability justice, and economic dignity. The same legislators who attack our community almost always attack the communities we belong to. Every legislator is evaluated across ten issue families that intersect with LGBTQ+ lives:

• LGBTQ+ equality
• Reproductive justice
• Racial justice
• Disability justice
• Voting rights
• Family, youth, and education
• Immigrant justice
• Criminal legal reform
• Healthcare access
• Expression and free speech

Source Hierarchy

When sources conflict, the higher-authority source wins. Provisional roll_calls rows are reconciled against the chamber journal of record before being promoted to verified. Hand-recorded crossovers in legislator_vote_exceptions always override the party-line default.

1. Chamber journal of record (roll call)
2. Legislative Service Commission bill analysis
3. Committee minutes and clerk reports
4. Primary-source news (hearing coverage, press events)
5. Sponsor-authored statements and press releases
6. Advocacy or opposition statements

Grade Scale

The per-member weighted total from the four inputs above is normalized to a 0–100 scale with max(0, min(100, 50 + raw * 5)), then the grade is applied from the table.

Grade	Label	Score Range
A+	Champion	90 – 100
A	Strong Ally	73 – 89
B	Supportive	55 – 72
C	Mixed Record	40 – 54
D	Unfriendly	20 – 39
F	Hostile	0 – 19

Data Sources

• Ohio General Assembly official vote records (legislature.ohio.gov), persisted in public.roll_calls by Migration 4
• Bill catalog and sponsorship records, persisted in public.bills by Migration 4
• Hand-recorded crossovers and absences, persisted in public.legislator_vote_exceptions
• Public statements, press conferences, and news coverage
• Equality Ohio and TransOhio legislative tracking
• ACLU Ohio legislative alerts
• Adjacent civil-rights scorecards (NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, NAACP Ohio Conference, ACLU Ohio, Ohio Voter Rights Coalition) for the intersectional component

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