Long after Kentucky lawmakers have left this year’s General Assembly session behind, the decisions they made will linger for generations to come. But it can be hard to find a voting record linked to each lawmaker.
Citizens have to search for individual bills and then find their lawmakers in a long list of names on a PDF file.
Kentucky Public Radio created an easier way to track those votes through sorting them by lawmaker, not by the bill. It’s made possible through a computer program that scrapes data from hundreds of pages and puts it all into one file.
“The idea here is that you should see if you agree with how your representatives voted and let that influence if you want to vote for them in the future,” KPR data reporter Justin Hicks said.
Capitol reporters Sylvia Goodman and Joe Sonka selected 18 different bills to display that were emblematic of the 2024 legislative session. They show how lawmakers decided issues related to education, health and voting.
Goodman said they selected some bills to be displayed even though they failed.
“It’s often said in Frankfort, if at first you don’t succeed, try try again,” Goodman said. “If a bill failed this year, especially a buzzy one, it’s not unlikely it’ll show up again next year. So how your lawmaker voted at the start can be pretty significant.”
Several of the votes lawmakers made will result in constitutional amendment questions on the November ballot.
This story by Kentucky Public Radio ran on WKMS, the public radio station at Murray State University.
