The single legislator page will display the following information if available.
District
Party
DC Address
Phone Number
Website
Facebook and Twitter Links
The legislator page will also show any bills that the legislator sponsored and include a filter to show bills by year or lifetime.
The legislator page will show any votes that the legislator has made and include a filter to show votes by year or lifetime. The legislators score will adjust based on the votes made in the year selected.
Information included for the vote includes:
Issue
Date
Latest Action
Vote (This is the position the legislator had on the vote)
Score (This is the position the legislator had compared to the user selected position)
Once you’ve imported votes, the Legislators will pre-populate with all the information which means you don’t need to do anything for this post type to be created! WP Congress uses the Legislator ID to track the legislator. We recommend not changing anything in the Legislator post type as any changes will be overwritten when new information is synced down from ProPublica.
Important: Legislative history and legislator records are imported ONLY for specific bills that are selected when configuring your WP Congress plugin. This means that if a bill is imported but a legislator does NOT have any history with that bill, that particular legislator's record will not be imported.
Questions about Legislators
Q: If a legislator moves legislative bodies, how does ProPublica track that?
A: ProPublica and WP Congress use the Legislator ID to track a legislator’s voting history, sort of like a social security number. Even if they change houses, states, last name, etc. they will still have the same Legislator ID. Unfortunately this means that if this does happen, we cannot track what votes were made when they were in one body vs. another.