2019 Legislative Scorecard
2019 Legislative Scorecard
This scorecard is designed to let you know where your California elected officials stand on a variety of issues critical to the disability community.
2019 LEGISLATIVE
SCORECARD
Introduction
Disability Rights California (DRC) is the largest disability rights organization in the nation. Our mission is to advocate, educate, investigate, and litigate to advance the rights, dignity, equal opportunities, and choices for all people with disabilities. For more than 40 years we have fought against discrimination, promoted the inclusion of people with disabilities into communities of their choice, and advocated for the services and supports that they need. Legislative advocacy and ensuring that California’s policymakers are fully informed of these needs is critical to advancing the rights of persons with disabilities.
Each year DRC advocates for persons with disabilities in the legislature on critical issues such as accessibility, education, physical and mental health, housing, transportation, public benefits, voting and the state budget. We serve as one of the leading voices on these issues in the legislature and bring with us the policy and advocacy experience of hundreds of DRC lawyers and advocates working in every county in the state. Our collective knowledge and representation of clients in facilities and institutions, state and local agencies and courts informs our legislative advocacy work and brings real and practical experiences to bear on significant policy issues. Each year DRC sponsors legislation and analyzes and advocates on hundreds of bills that impact the lives of persons with disabilities.
We believe that it is important that people with disabilities and the public know where their elected officials stand on legislation critical to the disability community.
The 2019 Legislative Scorecard
This legislative scorecard is designed to let the public know where legislators and the Governor stand on selected pieces of legislation critical to people with disabilities that the legislature considered in 2019. The bills included in the scorecard represent a cross-section of policy areas and include bills that DRC both supported and opposed.
We hope that this scorecard will provide useful information to the public, legislators, and the Governor on the variety of disability-rights issues and DRC’s advocacy position on them. It is designed to serve as both an educational tool for the public to provide feedback to the state’s policymakers and for those policymakers to use as they develop their positions.
This year only one legislator received a 100 percent score on the selected scorecard bills. Otherwise the scores ranged from 93 percent to 53 percent. These scores highlight that legislators must do more to recognize that persons with disabilities face ongoing challenges to meaningful access to services and defeating discrimination.
Scorecard Methodology
The bills included in the scorecard are some of the most important to the disability community in critical policy areas such as accessibility, public benefits, budget, education, housing, health facilities, mental health, and criminal justice. The scorecard compares member votes to DRC positions, creating an overall ranking of legislators based on those votes. Our scorecard methodology:
- Considers the percentage of votes cast on floor votes in the second house and on concurrence (if required) consistent with DRC’s position each time the member voted; and
- Ignores a legislator’s failure to vote on a bill attributable to an excused absence, as verified in the Daily Journal. We count a failure to vote, where there was no excused absence, as a vote against the DRC position.
We believe this methodology provides a useful record of which legislators supported DRC positions on issues critical to the unique rights and needs of people with disabilities.
Download a printable version of the Scorecard:
DRC 2019 Legislative Scorecard (pdf)
