2007 Progressive Maryland Education Fund's Legislative Scorecard

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Scores By Last Name - html table
Scores By District - html table
Printable Scorecards for All 47 Districts - pdf format
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2007 Legislative Scorecard Vote Descriptions:

Living Wage
The Living Wage bill ensures that our tax dollars are creating jobs that pay above the poverty line. It requires big, for-profit companies with a state service contract to pay workers on those contracts enough to live without Food Stamps. As a top priority of Progressive Maryland, this bill weighs more heavily than most of the other bills in determining a lawmaker's score.
Clean Money - Senate Vote
Passed by the House of Delegates during the 2006 session, this bill strips wealthy special interests of their ability to turn private money into undue political power. The reform makes it possible for legislators to focus on laws that benefit all the voters, not just the HMOs, pharmaceutical companies, and other special interests that fund the campaigns of elected officials. As a top priority of Progressive Maryland, this bill weighs more heavily than most of the other bills in determining a lawmaker's score.
School Construction
Temporary solutions to crumbling schools and infrastructure hurt our students and make permanent changes costlier. This vote approved a record $400 million in public school construction and repairs to get kids out of trailer classrooms and deteriorating facilities.
Paper Trail
Electronic balloting has proven unreliable and open to tampering. This bill would ensure that new touch-screen voting machines produce a verifiable, auditable paper ballot to safeguard against errors and fraud.
Child Care Workers' Right to Unionize - Committee Vote
Allows child care providers the choice of whether they want to join a union. This bill did not come to a full floor vote.
Ex-Felon Reenfranchisement
Returns full voting rights to former felons after they have served their sentence and paid their debt to society.
Health Care Extension
Offers a four-year extension to children covered under their parents' health insurance to prevent them from being added to the growing lists of the uninsured.
Leadership Score
This category scores a lawmaker on the bulk of the General Assembly's work that happens behind the scenes and is crucial to the legislative process: whether a lawmaker works with progressive advocates to advance working-family legislation, lobbies colleagues in favor of these bills, speaks publicly in favor of them, etc.

About the Progressive Maryland Education Fund 2007 Legislative Scorecard
The Progressive Maryland Education Fund (PMEF) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that monitors and reports on the voting records of state lawmakers and public policy issues. This scorecard is one of many tools used by PMEF to educate the public about issues of concern to working families.

Score Calculations
The two highest-priority bills, indicated at the top of the scorecard, are double-weighted, while the other six bills are single-weighted. A plus (+) indicates a progressive position on the bill while a negative (-) indicates a special-interest position on the bill. A plus (+) is worth full credit on that bill while a negative (-) is worth zero points on that bill, and an abstention is worth half credit. Excused absences and recusals do not factor into the score; not having to vote on a bill because it does not come up for a vote in committee or on the floor ordinarily does not factor into a lawmaker's score. Points earned on all the bills together account for 80% of a lawmaker's total score and the leadership score (described above) accounts for 20%.

Printable 2007 Scorecards for All 47 Districts (Adobe PDFs)

View Other Scorecards: For 2008, 2006 and 2005

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