Methodology

The ledger scores recorded floor votes only, against what Theodore Roosevelt did between 1901 and 1909. It owns its anachronisms, links every vote to the official roll call, and never shows a number it cannot trace to a recorded position.

What counts

Final passage and motions to proceed on bills and Congressional Review Act resolutions that decide something on federal public land; any recorded amendment vote that decides a distinct public-lands question, including a Senate motion to table one; confirmations of Interior and Agriculture land officials with a documented lands record; and omnibus bills carrying a major public-lands title, scored on that title’s net effect. One vote per measure per chamber, the final one. Voice votes and committee votes are not scored. The same rule applies to every Congress so lifetime records compare.

The vote lists were seeded from More Than Just Parks’ lists for each Congress, filtered by the rule above, and extended where the rule reaches a vote their list does not. Each Congress page lists what was considered and left out, with the reason. The 119th Congress was built first, as the pilot. No independent sweep of the earlier Congresses has been made yet; a missed vote is a correction we want.

Terms in vote titles

CRA: A Congressional Review Act resolution overturns an agency rule. A Yea overturns the rule; a Nay keeps it. That is why a CRA vote’s Roosevelt side is usually Nay.
RMP: Resource management plan: the Bureau of Land Management’s land-use plan for an area.
OCS: Outer Continental Shelf: federal submerged land offshore, leased for oil and gas.
NPR-A: National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska: 23 million federal acres on the North Slope.
LWCF: Land and Water Conservation Fund: offshore royalties spent on public land, parks and access.
ESA: Endangered Species Act of 1973.
NEPA: National Environmental Policy Act of 1970: the environmental review before a federal action.
BLM: Bureau of Land Management: some 245 million acres, most of them in the West.
BOEM: Bureau of Ocean Energy Management: leases the Outer Continental Shelf.
NRA: National recreation area.

The six pillars

Pillar	What Roosevelt did	What it scores
Keep public	Some 230 million acres set aside; fought land fraud and giveaways	disposal, transfer, exchange, sell-off riders, withdrawals and their reversal
Forests	The Forest Service, 1905; 150 national forests; use under restrictions that insure permanence	roadless, timber, grazing rules, NEPA on federal land, land-use plans
Antiquities	The 1906 Antiquities Act, used 18 times including the Grand Canyon	monuments, historic sites, protection of historic and scientific resources on federal land, wet or dry
Wildlife	51 bird reservations from Pelican Island, 1903; four game preserves	ESA on federal land, refuge rules, delisting by statute
Sportsman	Founded the Boone and Crockett Club, 1887; fair chase	access, hunter and angler funding, game management authority
Fair deal	Withdrew coal and phosphate lands from entry; the public gets paid, monopolies don’t	leasing mandates, royalties, mining law, permitting shortcuts

Forests is the pillar that keeps the index honest on multiple use. Roosevelt cut timber and grazed cattle. A timber vote is not automatically against him; the question is whether use stays under review.

Owning the anachronism

The Endangered Species Act, NEPA, the Congressional Review Act and the Land and Water Conservation Fund did not exist in 1909. Each vote is scored on the principle behind it, and the vote page shows the precedent, its year and its source. Where a coding is contestable, the note says so: Roosevelt hunted wolves and called the wolf the beast of waste and desolation, so wolf-delisting votes are scored on expert-run game management, not on wolves, and the note says that too.

The worked example of scoring by rule rather than by outcome is the Senate’s barred owl vote of 2025 (S.J.Res.69). The motion was to take up a Congressional Review Act resolution overturning the Fish and Wildlife Service’s strategy of removing barred owls to protect the northern spotted owl; it failed 25 to 72, so the strategy stands. Nay is Roosevelt’s side because the question scored is whether the agency’s expert plan stands, the principle behind his 1903 order putting the bird reservations under the Biological Survey’s wardens, not whether either owl fares better. The vote page carries the Contestable tag. More Than Just Parks does not score it.

The formula

Score = Σ(with × w) ÷ Σ((with + against + ½ missed) × w) × 100, the same skeleton More Than Just Parks uses; under the equal-weight lens every w is 1, so it is votes with Roosevelt out of votes taken, with a missed vote counting half.

Coding

A Yea or Nay on Roosevelt’s side counts with him; the other side counts against; not voting or Present while seated counts as missed. A member is scored only on votes taken while seated.

Grades

A+ is 100 with no misses; A 90–99; B 80–89; C 70–79; D 60–69; F below 60. Grades read from the displayed whole number.

Means

A delegation mean or a Congress mean is the plain average of the members’ scores under the chosen lens, counting only members who have a score. Each Congress has its own vote list, so means are readings of how each Congress voted on its own questions, not one scale across Congresses.

Where the positions come from

Every position comes from Voteview’s roll-call record and is checked, vote by vote, against the House Clerk’s and the Senate’s own XML. Where the two disagree, the official record governs, and each such correction is listed below with its source; the largest group is 27 paired or announced positions from 1989-90 that Voteview records as votes and the official roll calls record as not voting. Equal-weight scores are reconciled with More Than Just Parks, the public-lands scorecard whose vote lists seeded the ledger’s, on every vote both lists share; the ledger applies its own rules to what qualifies, so the lists differ, and each difference is recorded with its reason. Three votes are coded against their reading on purpose, all under Sportsman and all for keeping hunting open: the 1980 amendment that made parts of Alaska’s new parks preserves, the 1991 amendment keeping hunting in the Mojave monument, and the 1994 amendment that made the East Mojave a national preserve rather than a national park. Each says so on its vote page.

The 36 positions corrected against the official roll call

Every vote from the 101st Congress on has been checked position by position against the official roll call. Before that (the House before 1990, the Senate before 1989) no official roll call is published online, so those positions rest on Voteview, which transcribed them from the Congressional Record, and each such vote page says so.

Where the ledger differs from More Than Just Parks

More Than Just Parks publishes the Congressional Public Lands Score, the other vote-by-vote public-lands record that reaches back to 1975. The ledger leans on it twice: its lists seeded every Congress’s vote list, and its equal-weight scores are the check the pipeline is reconciled against on every vote both lists share. The differences are deliberate, and each is written down.

The standard. More Than Just Parks reads a vote as for or against public lands on the evidence of its effect. The ledger reads it against a dated precedent in Theodore Roosevelt’s record, cited on every vote page. The two agree on the direction of every shared vote but three, all amendments that kept hunting open in new preserves (Alaska 1980, the Mojave 1991, the East Mojave 1994), which the ledger scores with Roosevelt under Sportsman.
The list. Of the 820 votes on their list for the 94th through 118th Congresses, the ledger scores 687, leaves out 133, and adds 27 they do not score; for the 119th it is 31 votes to their 37. Every Congress page lists what was considered and left out, with the reason. The classes left out: near-unanimous conveyances coded against the whole chamber; study-only bills; water-project exemptions from the Endangered Species Act; regulation that reaches all lands, not federal land (surface mining, the Stream Protection Rule, Clean Air class I); confirmations without a documented lands record; votes that are not land decisions, such as the 2025 amendment reinstating fired land managers; and a second vote on the same measure. The additions: the final vote on an omnibus bill with a lands title (the Energy Policy Acts of 2003 and 2005, the 2017 tax act’s Arctic Refuge title) where their list scores an earlier passage or none; standalone Arctic Refuge and offshore leasing bills; and the 2025 barred owl motion, kept as the worked example of scoring by rule rather than outcome.
One vote per measure per chamber, the final one. A substitute that changes the short title is a new measure, so Build Back Better and the Inflation Reduction Act both score while a bill’s first passage does not when a later vote on the same measure follows.
Confirmations score only with a lands record written into the note; a nominee with no record, or one that points both ways, is left out however their list treats it.
Pillars. Every ledger vote sits under one of six pillars anchored in Roosevelt’s record; their score has no pillars. Placement is a ledger call and is sometimes contestable: coal resource-plan resolutions sit under Forests because the question scored is whether the agency’s plan stands.
Lenses. Their score counts every vote once. The ledger’s equal-weight lens does the same and is the one reconciled with it; the acres, dollars and access lenses are the ledger’s own and change the weights, never the direction.
Positions. Both draw on Voteview. From 1989 on the ledger checks every position against the official roll call and lists its 36 corrections above; before that both rest on Voteview’s transcription and count paired positions as votes.
Contestable codings carry a tag on the vote page and a note saying why, and the pages are limited to the twelve covered states’ members while the means use every member. The Big Stick Gap, words against votes, is the ledger’s own.

Scope

This first release covers the Intermountain West and the Pacific states with the most federal land as a share of area: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming (CRS report R42346, 2024 acreage). Scores run from the 94th Congress, 1975, forward.

The lenses

The formula never changes; a lens changes the weight w each vote carries: score = Σ(with × w) ÷ Σ((with + against + ½ missed) × w) × 100. Every page has a lens control, and the choice follows you from page to page. A member is shown a lens score only when every vote they were seated for carries that lens’s data; where no vote carries weight, the page says so instead of showing a number.

Lens	Weight	Where the number comes from
Equal weight	1	The baseline. The one reconciled with More Than Just Parks.
Acres in state	log₁₀(federal acres the vote reaches inside the member’s state + 1)	Each vote carries a scope: every acre one or more agencies manage (BLM, Forest Service, Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Defense), those agencies’ acres in named states, or a named unit with its own acreage split by state. Agency acres by state come from CRS report R42346, Table 1 (2024). Unit acreage comes from the agency’s own figure for the unit, cited on the vote page. Votes on the Outer Continental Shelf, on foreign programs and on process alone reach no acres and carry no weight. The log keeps Alaska from swamping the model: a vote that reaches 93 million Alaska acres weighs 8, one that reaches 44 acres weighs 1.6.
Conservation dollars	log₁₀(\|dollars the vote moves\| + 1)	Annual amounts written in the statute or estimated by CBO for land and conservation programs: the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the Great American Outdoors Act, wildlife grants, park foundation matches. Most votes move no money and carry no weight, so this lens reads only the funding record.
Hunter and angler access	\|access impact\|, −3 to +3	The one editorial lens, coded by hand under the rubric below. The sign is shown for information; the score direction still comes from the Roosevelt coding. Every vote page shows its code and the one-line reason.

The access rubric

Code	Meaning	Examples
+3	Opens or guarantees broad public access, or adds a large area the public can use	easement records for every agency; completing a national trail; permanent acquisition money; a wilderness or park package of a million acres or more; blocking public land sales
+2	Adds or protects a substantial area or a real access right	a state wilderness bill; a mineral withdrawal that keeps a landscape open; a refuge expansion; keeping the Arctic coastal plain closed
+1	Helps access at the margin	small boundary additions; conservation funding without an acquisition title; park administration; volunteer programs
0	No access effect	royalty rates and fees; ESA process and listings; permit timelines; confirmations; process-only amendments; anything offshore
−1	Narrows access or review at the margin	a small conveyance; a categorical exclusion that changes what gets built, not who gets in
−2	Converts a substantial area away from public use or strips a management tool the public relies on	leasing mandates on named landscapes; mining fast-tracks; a road through refuge wilderness; nullifying a plan that limited leasing
−3	Disposes of public land or closes access outright	land sales and transfers out of federal ownership; exchanges that hand a landscape to a mine; a budget instruction to sell public land

Rules of thumb: a vote that only changes who pays is 0; a vote that changes what land is public is ±3; a vote that changes what can be done on it is ±2; a vote that changes paperwork is ±1 or 0. Motorized-access rules are coded on the public’s overall access, not on any one user group.

The Big Stick Gap

Speak softly and carry a big stick. The Big Stick page plots what a member says against what they do. Stick is the member’s ledger score under the chosen lens for the Congress in which their statements were reviewed. Words is the number of pro-public-lands claims a year in their official statements, scaled so twelve a year reads as 100. Gap is Stick minus Words. The quadrants are named for the outcome: speaks softly, big stick is Roosevelt’s; loud and delivers; quiet, no stick; all hat.

A claim is a statement, in the member’s or their office’s words, of what they want or did on federal public land. Each is coded to one pillar and read the way a vote is read: pro if Roosevelt’s record puts him on that side, anti if not, neutral if it takes no side (a funding notice, a payment announcement). Only pro claims count toward Words; the other two are listed so the coding can be checked. Every claim is listed, a row for each release it appears in, but Words counts subjects, not releases: each row carries a subject (the bill, the named act, or the fight it belongs to, such as the 2025 land-sale provision or the Roadless Rule), and a member’s pro claims count once per subject per year. Ten releases on one bill are one. Twelve subjects a year reads as 100; across the 72 members coded so far the 90th percentile is 11.5, so only the loudest few reach it. Every claim links to the official page it came from and quotes at most a few dozen words of it. The window each source was reviewed over is shown, so claims per year has an honest denominator.

The receipt pairs one pro claim with one recorded vote of the same pillar, the two closest in time, and shows how the member voted. The pairing is mechanical: same pillar, closest dates, no choosing. The first release covers Idaho’s four members from their official press releases over the 119th Congress; floor statements and official social accounts are the next two sources.

Votes, not parties

The site shows no party affiliation and uses no party color, and takes no position on any candidate or election. It is an independent Pydaho Labs project; the person who runs it is a federal employee.