Nodak Outdoors ND Legislator Scoring Sheet - 2003

Disappointed with your representation in office in recent years? Here's a scoring card of how each legislator voted in favor of hunting issues that are important to the state of North Dakota.

The percentage column reflects the percent of weighted points that voted in favor of hunters. For letter grading, the percentages were converted to letter grades using a scale of 92/84/76/68. With only 5 possible letter grades, the rank helps put into perspective how each legislator stacked up to all legislators (141 total Sens. and Reps.), in other words, how good the A's were and how bad the F's were.

For purposes of evaluating the legislators, we used only those votes for which we sent an etree notice. That's why you'll see some bills scored twice (because we etree'd and they were voted twice, e.g. 2048 in the House) and other bills scored only in one house or the other or not at all (because although the may have been hunting related, we didn't send an etree notice on them for a variety of reasons). Again, legislators were graded on ALL and ONLY those VOTES on which an etree notice was sent.

For the bigger bills, we assigned a greater weight. Lesser, non-controversial bills got a much lower weight. We didn't try to go behind the motives of any particular vote or include other subjective criteria when assigning grades. For instance, we opposed 1307 (Nelson Plan), and we know that several unfriendly legislators voted against 1307 not for our reasons but for the reason they opposed ANY caps. Since in the etree we asked for a no, even the unfriendlies got the points for voting against 1307. Also, some legislators were friendly beyond what their scores may reflect. We decided not to try to take subjective things like that into account, and instead graded strictly on the voting records.

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