On Legislative Scorecards

Everyone has an agenda

Since being elected I’ve come to realize that not all scorecards are created equal...

Many are deliberately manipulated to serve narrow agendas.

Take the recently defunct American Action Fund, run by YAL (Young Americans for Liberty). They published a Libertarian-based scorecard that conveniently cherry-picked bills to elevate their preferred legislators while completely ignoring numerous solid conservative measures:

Surprise, surprise, their golden boys (and girls) scored higher than everyone else.

Because here's what these fraudsters WON'T tell you: YAL (the group behind this scorecard) deliberately IGNORED over 30 no-brainer conservative bills.

For example, they memory-holed MY anti-SLAPP bill protecting free speech, SNAP reforms, tax cuts, the landmark Medical Freedom Act, indecent exposure laws, and my bill to limit the power of Idaho's public health districts (among others).

Why the cooked books?

Because including all these votes would have shown that the conservatives they love to attack as "traitors" are actually MORE conservative than they want you to believe.

This isn't a scorecard. It's a hit piece designed to make solid conservatives look weak.

They cherry-picked votes to create an artificial gap between "real" conservatives and the ones they're trying to primary. By excluding bills where we ALL voted conservative, they manufactured a fake narrative about who the "true believers" really are.

This wasn't oversight.

It was (and is) an intentionally deceptive hack job.

The IACI (Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry) scorecard is even worse. Their methodology is absurd:

• "Vote in line with IACI position" = positive score

• "Vote out of line with IACI position" = demerit

Zero nuance, zero context.

Just pure partisan hackery.

Even AI-generated scorecards fail spectacularly at understanding legislative nuance. Because they often can't distinguish between struck-through text and new language in bill drafts, leading to fundamentally wrong assessments of what many bills actually do.

I could go on and on and on…

Point being: every scorecard reflects its creator's agenda.

Because no single scorecard captures the complete truth as orgs routinely manipulate data, cherry-pick votes, and ignore "inconvenient legislation" to protect their preferred politicians.

Voters deserve better than propaganda disguised as analysis.

Scorecards are tools that can inform, but treating any single scorecard as gospel is shortsighted.