You can search for a bill by bill number. Select a Prefix, Number and Congress Number and click find.
Importing Votes
You can import votes by going to the Admin Dashboard and then WP Congress > Settings. Once there, click Import tab and use the bill search tools:
There are two ways to search for bills, you can either search by Keyword or by bill Number.
For the keyword search, there is a dropdown to sort results by date or relevance.
Note: Multiple words are treated as separated via OR operator. Use quotes to find phrases. Ex. oceans forests vs “PLASTICS Act”
Tip: If you know the name of the bill, enter it in quotes and select sort by relevance to get the desired result.
Note: If you check “Find bills RELATED to this bill (not this bill itself).” The results will include bills related to the bill entered.
After clicking “Find”, results will appear, under search forms.
Select a position of bill (options are “For” and “Against”) and click the Add button next to the desired bill.
After clicking Add, the bill will be imported and all correlating bill data and legislators will be imported in the background. The success message will look like the image below and include a link to edit the bill that was imported. There you can add personal messaging that will be displayed on the single bill page.
Editing Votes
Once finished importing, go to WP Congress > Votes and you will see your most recently imported votes saved as Drafts. Hover below the title and select “Edit”:
By default, imported bills are set to draft, enter content you would like to have displayed on the bill’s page and click “Publish” to make the bill live.
If the bill has votes, you will see votes in the Bill Votes box (see image below). By default, the position for this vote will be set to the bill position but this can be manually adjusted per vote. The legislator score will be adjusted based on the position of each vote that is imported.
Note: Not all legislators vote on every roll call so changing the position of a vote might not change the score if the legislator did not vote.
Note: The position is saved once a new value in the dropdown is selected.
Important: Legislative history and legislator records are imported ONLY for specific bills that are selected when configuring your WP Congress plugin. This means that if a bill is imported but a legislator does NOT have any history with that bill, that particular legislator's record will not be imported.