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Installation & Setup

How do I setup the BillTrack50 scorecard on my website using the Legislative Scorecard software?

How do I set up a scorecard on BillTrack50?

  1. Sign up for a free Citizen level account on BillTrack50.
  2. In your Citizen account, click the free trial link to start a trial. The trial allows you to create your first Bill Sheet. Then, search for and add bills to a bill sheet. (You will later use this bill sheet to populate your scorecard.) Watch this video to learn how to start a free trial and search for bills.
  3. Email Karen, Founder of BillTrack50, at [email protected]. Let her know you’re interested in demoing her scorecard feature to get it added to your trial account.
  4. Add your Bill Sheet’s bills to your scorecard. For more on that, watch how to set up a scorecard or schedule a short scorecard demo with Karen.

WordPress Theme Requirements

Your theme must have a full-width desktop template of 960px wide or wider to display this scorecard. If you don’t have one included, you could look at creating a child theme to add one.

We do not recommend using a page template that includes a sidebar, because our plugin comes with a built-in sidebar.

Server Requirements

We support the same server system requirements as WordPress: PHP v7.4+, MySQL v5.6+, https/SSL, and the latest version of WordPress.

The scorecard keeps showing a loading symbol and the scorecard fields in the WordPress admin ARE greyed out.

Back up your site. Then set the WordPress permalink structure to ‘post-name’. Here’s an example.

The scorecard keeps showing a loading symbol and the scorecard fields in the WordPress admin are NOT greyed out.

Go to BillTrack50.com and log into your account. If you’re not able to log in and view your bills, then BillTrack50 is likely down. Please let your contact at BillTrack50 know. Otherwise, if you are able to log into BillTrack50 and view bills, contact our team instead.

It’s the start of the new session and my legislators aren’t displaying.

Legislator votes determine which legislators your scorecard grades and includes. If you’ve changed your scorecard to a new session, no legislators will show because they haven’t made any votes yet. To solve this, contact BillTrack50 and have them add a dummy bill in your BillTrack50 scorecard with a vote for each legislator. Once you get House and Senate votes, you can remove this dummy bill.

It’s the start of the new session and I only have votes for House members.

It likely means the bill has been voted on in the House, but not the Senate yet. You can view that bill’s current status in the detail section of the individual BillTrack50 bill.

Some legislator headshots are missing

For new legislators, their headshots will pull in once they have cast a vote that has been pulled into your scorecard. If they do not display, contact us.

All legislator headshots are missing

A legislator has left office this year but I still want to show them in my scorecard for the current year

Log into BillTrack50 and go to your scorecard. Edit your scorecard’s settings via the ‘Manage’ tab to include out of office legislators in the scorecard.

Some legislators are missing after the above items are resolved.

Please contact us. Include your website url, a WordPress administrator login, and the names of the missing legislators.

Contact us to setup a Congressional or State Legislative Scorecard for your organization.

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