Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The My Legislator newsletter helps you hold your state legislators accountable. Sign up to receive a weekly email for the activities of your legislators in the Capitol.
Here’s what you need to know about how the newsletter works.
Where does all this information about my legislators come from?
My legislator is powered by Digital democracy database. It brings together diverse information and data from across government that is publicly available but isolated and difficult to access. This database combines these related data sources so that they can be compared to reveal connections, patterns, and biases in the legislative and policy-making process.
The database includes four categories of information: transcripts, account information, financial information, and district data. Get a full breakdown of our digital democracy data sources and methodology page.
How are legislator rankings calculated?
We use standard race (“1224”) ranking to determine the ranks of legislators. All legislators with the same value (eg number of bills passed) share the same rank, leaving a gap in the ranking numbers. For example, if two legislators tie for the second most passed bill, the ranks will be 1, 2, 2, 4, 5, and so on (skipping 3).
That means if there’s a tie for last place, the lowest rank won’t be 120, the total number of legislators in California. Depending on how many people make up links in the last place, the lowest rank may be different in different categories.
How is Legislator Bipartisanship Calculated?
Our bipartisan estimate is based on bill authorship records. We count the number of times a legislator from one party authored or co-authored a bill with a member of another party. For example, if a Democratic legislator is the lead author of a version of a bill and Republican legislators are listed as co-authors, then we consider this to be a case of bipartisanship.
Lead authors are primarily responsible for the content of the bill and guide it through the legislative process. Co-authors are legislators who, with the permission of the lead authors, add their name to the bill as a sign of support for the bill; they are usually not responsible for the specific wording of the bill.
There are three combinations that we consider cases of bipartisanship:
- a republican lead author(s) with a Democrat lead author(s)
- a republican lead author(s) with a Democrat co-author(s)
- a democrat lead author(s) with a republican co-author(s)
Each version of the bill that matches one of the three combinations counts as one case, increasing the scores of all participating legislators by one. Then we rank legislators based on their final results.
Who are the “Notable” Voices of the Week?
Lawmakers can cast hundreds of votes in a week, more than can reasonably fit on a single ballot. We use a set of metrics from Digital democracy to consider which of your legislators’ voices to highlight, including:
- Bills with votes that differ from legislators’ past voting patterns
- Intensity of debate on bills, such as the number and length of back-and-forth debates between speakers
- Number and influence of organizations taking positions on the bills
- The relevance of the bills to current news coverage or current political debates
- Amount of text added and removed from accounts
- Total number of speakers during legislative discussions
What do account statuses mean?
The PASSING and FAILURE the statuses we show in the bulletin show the voting results of a particular committee or chamber.
A failed vote does not necessarily mean the bill is dead and cannot move forward. Committees can vote to reconsider a bill they did not initially pass.
For a bill to reach the governor’s desk, the same version of the bill must pass at least once in both the Senate and the Assembly.
Can I sign up for more than two legislators?
Currently, you can only sign for one state senator and one member of the assembly per email address. If you are interested in following more than two legislators, you can sign up for the newsletter using a different email address.
How do I register? How do I unsubscribe?
To register, fill in your details on our registration page.
To unsubscribe, click Unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.
More questions?
If you have any questions, suggestions, or thoughts about our team, contact us at digitaldemocracy@calmatters.org.