Objection to Scorecard Answered

DCR commenting on Huckleberries Online assails the Idaho Conservative scorecard:

The entire ranking is a farce.

Representatives were not evaluated on the same criteria as Senators, so both reports are meaningless.

Case in point: Representatives were ranked on how they voted on the guns on campus legislation. Senators were not – which is odd because the guns on campus bill was killed in the Senate, and the Republican Senators who voted against it (particularly McGee) got favorable conservative rankings anyway.

This disparity, in addition to the intrinsic inanity of the rankings, blows the rankings completely apart and highlights how meaningless they are.

However, it’s not surprising – the “ranker” is not known for consistency, clarity and logic anyway.

The commenter is entitlted to his opinion. However, there’s a big problem in his logic. The one vote he cites as an example was not killed on the Senate floor, it was killed in committee, so the whole Senate never got a chance to vote on it, thus it didn’t end up on the scorecard because the senate did not vote on it. No legislative scorecard can effectively score a vote in committee as opposed to votes on the floor. That’s comparing apples and oranges. 80% of the Senate didn’t vote on the bill because they weren’t part of the committee that killed it.

And there’s a big logical problem with this argument against the scorecard as well. If we were comparing House members to Senators, it would be necessary that the House and Senate have the exact same issues. However, the scorecards compare House Members to House members and Senators to Senators. The only thing that’s needed is for each member of a given house to be judged on the same bills. I based the idea for these rankings on the American Conservative Union rankings. If you compare the votes the ACU used in the Senate and the votes used in the House, you will find entirely different sets of issues, based on what was actually voted upon on the floor.

This is the case with every scorecard for any group.  Because people who write scorecards have no control over what bills make their way to the floor. Scorecards are not perfect tools, but they are tools that provide voters with actual information on how people voted and that’s what we’re trying to do.

Read more at Adam’s Blog