For more than a decade, the Evidence Based Wyoming Legislator Comparison tool has given Wyoming citizens something no campaign mailer or advocacy scorecard ever could: an unfiltered look at how their legislators actually vote. From a single launch page, you could pull up conservative-liberal rankings, check legislative transparency, track critical defections, score bills yourself, dig into any legislator’s voting detail, or compare two legislators head to head. Thousands of votes, organized and searchable, dating back to 2009.
That foundation — built on innovative agreement-based scoring that measured each legislator’s distance from both party caucuses — revealed patterns that campaign rhetoric tried to hide. But one distance metric, no matter how well constructed, can only tell part of the story. A legislator who is fiscally conservative but socially moderate looks the same as one who votes the party line on everything. A 55-5 blowout carries the same weight as a 31-29 nail-biter. And you could not tell whether a legislator’s breaks from their party actually changed any outcomes.
The new Evidence Based Wyoming combines our proven scoring innovations with modern statistical techniques and AI-powered fiscal analysis to give you a true, multi-dimensional picture of how a legislator actually votes — despite their public persona. EBW gives you the tools to peer under each legislator’s hood.
Modern Math, Better Rankings
The original agreement-distance approach worked well, and it is still part of the toolkit. But the new platform adds Principal Component Analysis and Singular Value Decomposition — established statistical techniques used in political science research — to discover the ideological spectrum directly from voting patterns. Nobody decides which bills are “conservative” or “liberal.” The math examines every recorded vote simultaneously and finds the single biggest dividing line on its own. The result is a Position Score from 0 to 100 that places each legislator on the spectrum based entirely on how they vote, not what anyone thinks the votes mean.
The composite rankings now combine six independent inputs — Position Score, agreement rates with both parties, the proven distance metric, party consistency, and participation — using a second stage of PCA to determine the weights. The data decides what matters most, not editorial judgment. You can see exactly which inputs drove each session’s rankings through the PCA loadings displayed right on the page.
Consistency That Counts: Weighted Party Alignment
The original critical defections tracker was one of the tool’s most popular features. It is still here, and it is better. The new Weighted Party Alignment gives extra weight to close votes — because sticking with your party on a 55-5 vote is easy, but sticking with them on a 31-29 vote takes real commitment. Critical defections now specifically identify the moments where a legislator voted against their party AND their party lost the overall vote. Together, these answer the question simple agreement rates never could: does this legislator stand with their team when it actually counts?
Voting Blocs and Bridge Legislators
Party labels tell you what team a legislator is on. They do not tell you who actually votes together. The new similarity analysis computes agreement rates between every legislator pair and uses hierarchical clustering to discover natural voting blocs — groups that vote together more often than they vote with anyone outside their group. This regularly reveals sub-groups within a party and cross-party alliances that are completely invisible from the R or D next to someone’s name. Bridge legislators — the swing votes who connect different blocs and shape outcomes on close bills — are identified automatically using graph theory.
AI-Powered Fiscal Analysis: Follow the Money
An AI reads the actual text of every bill, amendment, and fiscal note to determine how much state money is at stake and which vote represents the “spend less” position. Each legislator gets scored on a dollar-weighted score (because voting to save $100 million matters more than voting to save $10,000). Budget bills and standard bills are handled differently — amendment votes on budgets are scored, but the final budget passage vote is not, because nearly everyone votes for the budget regardless of where they stood on individual spending fights.
Every AI assessment includes a one-sentence explanation of its reasoning and is fully auditable on the Fiscal Bill Details page. No black box. No trust-us. Check the work yourself.
Influence on Close Votes
Who wins when it matters? The new Margin of Influence metric identifies the narrowest roll calls — where every vote could tip the outcome — and calculates each legislator’s win rate on those votes. A legislator who is consistently on the winning side of close votes is someone with real influence, whether through coalition-building, strategic positioning, or simply being in the center of the chamber.
Everything Published, Everything Reproducible
Every formula, every algorithm, every decision point is documented on the Methodology page. The data comes from the official Wyoming Legislature records. Given the same data and the same methods, anyone can reproduce the results. During active sessions, data syncs nightly so scores stay current as votes are cast.
The Bottom Line
Politicians craft a public image. Voting records tell the real story. The original Evidence Based Wyoming gave you a window into that story. The new version gives you the whole book — seven independent lenses, built on proven scoring innovations enhanced with modern statistical techniques and artificial intelligence, all designed to answer one question: how does your legislator actually vote?
Visit the new site at scoring.evidencebasedwyoming.com and see for yourself.