Frankly, and I’m no expert, but the math and effort required to do what no one else is doing but you at least to my limited knowledge might be worth the effort to either form your own site to distribute, or partner with FR to have an ongoing by year rating that appears far more accurate than the individual efforts of partisan raters.
What better way to educate the public taking into account both sides of the political spectrum in the process. I like it, as one more way to hold real elected officials feet to the fire, especially those truly concerned about their constituents.
So, I’m going to try it on my own Congresswoman.
ADA, AFSCME, LCV Liberal Groups.
ACU, CFG, FRC Conservative Groups.
Convert liberal to conservative add all six scores and divide by 600.
Unfamiliar with Barone’s Almanac but it might behoove me to become familiar. You only used it to choose the six vote scorers if I understand your method.
So am I missing anything important, and what would factoring in more raters, especially conservative, do to the ratings, other than increase the score for conservatives. I’m looking at Heritage Action, and Club for Growth specifically.
I already included Club for Growth (I abbreviated it CFG).
I use Michael Barone’s The Almanac of American Politics, 2014 edition, not only to select the 6 ideological vote raters, but to obtain said ratings for 2011 and 2012; of course, one can obtain the ratings by visiting six different websites, which might be a good idea a few months from now to see whether ratings for 2013 are up.
As for adding other raters, one has to be careful how it is done, since if, for example, you included two economic-conservative groups in addition to the CFG, the overall rating would be tilted in favor of economic conservatives and would not give sufficient importance to social issues.
I certainly don’t have the time to compute amalgamated conservative ratings for all 435 House members and 100 Senators, but if someone computes them (a spreadsheet would be the easiest way to do so), we can create an FR thread for the ratings.