Today we published our 2021 Overall Rankings. I know, it’s 2022 and we just finished up with 2021 rankings. This past year, to save an enormous amount of time and eliminate any possibility of human error, we moved to a more automated system to tally and score votes. But thoroughly testing and tuning this system took more time than we …

By this time of the year our full General Assembly rankings sets would normally be published. However, we made the decision last month to hold back our 2021 releases and re-factor our Environmental Rankings to ensure the utmost accountability is properly assigned to all members of the General Assembly. Much of the delay lies in the way the House does …

The 2021 RI Rank Environmental Rankings for the Rhode Island General Assembly have been published and can be reviewed here. This year saw substantial improvements across the majority of members in both chambers. Part of this was due to an influx of progressive legislators voted into office last Fall, but ultimately more existing legislators are seeing the writing on the …

This year’s Social Media Rankings for the Rhode Island General Assembly have been published and can be reviewed here. Last year was the inaugural edition of our rankings, and though we set arguably low standards, a fair number of legislators failed to meet even half of them. This year we saw some overall improvement, but was almost entirely attributed to …

Next month we will publish our annual Social Media Rankings among the members of the Rhode Island General Assembly. In our inaugural rankings, we used generous criteria that allowed even those legislators who made minimal efforts to earn an acceptable score. This year, we tightened the requirements to better match what constituents expect when trying to engage with their lawmakers …

2020 was an interesting year, and it was quite evident at the State House where leaders of both chambers decided to take a legislative vacation while COVID-19 ravaged the state and the nation. As a result of this, there were virtually no bills to rank for the 2020 session. This, unfortunately, eliminated our ability to release a complete rankings set …

We have officially kicked off the 2021 rankings season (abbreviated as it may be) with our biennial Election Strength Report. This report quantifies election results for each member of the General Assembly and presents it in an easy to understand metric. While Election Strength is not a measure of job performance, this metric was fairly predictive of how well a …

There are many organizations that exist who rate elected officials based on any number of positions: the NRA, AFL-CIO, NEA, and the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, to name a few. These are openly partisan organizations who support a specific position to benefit a specific group of people. They provide value to their members by helping them vote for candidates …

When we set out to create RI Rank, we made it a point to avoid the promotion of “tribal politics” by omitting party affiliation from our rankings segments. We reasoned that for what we are trying to accomplish, listing party affiliation provided no value, and in fact detracted from our mission. By listing an “R” or a “D”, this risks …

When we set out to create RI Rank, our main focus was on ease of use. We took a good look at the legislator scorecards that already exist – Common Cause, the ACLU, and the Environmental Council of RI to name a few – and made it our mission to do it better. We found that each organization had a …