Extra Credit:
Citizens for Global Solutions recognizes legislators make important contributions to global issues that are often not reflected in roll call votes. Rather than ignoring this hard work, we strive to incorporate it into our final grades by awarding Extra Credit to legislators who promote our core issues outside the arena of recorded votes. Examples include sponsorship of legislation, op-eds, floor speeches and other public statements. Legislators with a 100% voting record who qualified for extra credit were awarded Special Recognition.

Methodology:
Each of the 19 votes was weighted in order to reflect the importance of the legislation to our organization’s core values (with “3” as the highest weight). In order to calculate a legislator’s grade, we first coded the data where a ‘Yea’ equals 1 and a ‘Nay’ equals 0 (binary). To arrive at the individual’s percentage rating we took a weighted average of his/her votes. We then set letter grade parameters on a curve (based on the descriptive statistics of the population) to reflect the final performance of each individual. Grading parameters differ for each chamber because the mean and median were also different. Finally, if a legislator was eligible to receive extra credit, he/she received one full letter grade higher than his or her converted percentage grade to get their final grade.

Incomplete:
Members of Congress received an incomplete (I) if they were not in Congress for a majority of the votes considered in our 2006 Congressional Report Card.