How the score works
Every candidate page carries a number from 0 to 100. 100 is the most supportive of legal cannabis access; 0 is the most restrictive. This page is the whole method, including the judgments, so that anyone who disagrees can find the exact line they disagree with.
What counts
Only two kinds of act move the number: a recorded vote and authoring or signing on to a bill. Both are matters of public record that can be checked against the journals and the Legislature's own bill pages.
Statements, questionnaire answers, interviews and campaign platforms are shown on every candidate page but do not move the number. They are real evidence of a position and often the only evidence a challenger has — but reading a direction out of prose is our judgment, and a score should not rest on it.
What does not count, and why
- Procedural votes. A motion to suspend a reading rule is not a position on a bill. One senator voted to suspend the rule and then against the bill itself on the same day; counting the first would have recorded her as supporting something she voted against.
- Amendment votes. Amendment No. 1 to Senate Bill 3 reduced the penalties in it, so a vote for that amendment pointed the opposite way to a vote for the bill. Rather than judge each amendment, none are scored.
- Bills whose direction is arguable. Listed at the bottom of this page, with the reason each was left out.
No record is not a zero
A candidate with no recorded vote and no bill authorship gets no score at all — not a zero. Zero is the score of someone who voted consistently to restrict access. Silence is not that. Most challengers have never held office and so can never have a vote on file, and scoring them as though they had voted would be the single most misleading thing this site could do.
The arithmetic
Each scored act is given a direction from −2 to +2 toward legal access, taken from the bill table below and never from the individual. A Nay counts as the negation of a Yea. Each act is weighted by kind — a floor vote counts 3, authoring a bill counts 3, signing on as a coauthor counts 2 — and by recency: full weight within two years, 0.6 out to six years, 0.3 beyond. Positions change, but an old vote never stops counting.
The weighted average lands between −2 and +2 and is rescaled to 0–100. Every candidate page shows the individual acts that produced the number and what each contributed, so the arithmetic can be redone by hand.
Alongside the score, each page states how many of that candidate's records were scored and labels the result thin (one or two acts), moderate (three to five) or strong (six or more). A score from one vote and a score from twelve are not the same claim and are not presented as though they were.
The bill table
This is the only place a human judgment enters the score, and it is made once per bill rather than once per candidate. Every legislator who voted the same way on the same bill is therefore scored identically.
⚠️ The caption does not give the direction. Senate Bills 3, 5 and 6 are all captioned as the “regulation of products derived from hemp”, which sounds neutral; their effect was to prohibit consumable hemp products containing intoxicating THC. Direction is taken from effect, and the evidence is in the reason column.
| Bill | Subject | A Yes vote counts | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| HB 218 88R | Penalties for possession | +2 | Reduced the criminal and licensing consequences of possessing marihuana and certain tetrahydrocannabinols. |
| HB 63 86R | Penalties for possession | +2 | Reduced the criminal and licensing consequences of small-amount marihuana possession to a civil penalty. |
| HB 441 87R | Penalties for possession | +2 | Reduced the criminal and licensing consequences of marihuana and paraphernalia possession offences. |
| HB 1831 88R | Regulate and tax cannabis | +2 | Would have regulated and taxed the cultivation, sale and possession of cannabis and provided for expunction of records. |
| HB 447 87R | Regulate and tax cannabis | +2 | Would have regulated the cultivation, manufacture, distribution, sale, possession and use of cannabis and cannabis products. |
| HB 46 89R | Texas Compassionate-Use Program | +1 | Expanded the state medical cannabis programme. Medical access only, so it scores less than an adult-use measure. |
| HB 1535 87R | Low-THC cannabis for more conditions | +1 | Widened the medical conditions qualifying for low-THC cannabis and created review boards to evaluate more. |
| HB 1805 88R | Low-THC cannabis for more conditions | +1 | Widened the medical conditions qualifying for low-THC cannabis. |
| HB 1146 89R | Low-THC cannabis for more conditions | +1 | Widened the medical conditions qualifying for low-THC cannabis. |
| HB 1250 88R | More Compassionate-Use dispensing licences | +1 | Expanded the number of dispensing organisation licence holders under the medical programme. |
| HB 1694 87R | Defence to prosecution for small amounts | +1 | Created a defence to prosecution for possession of small amounts when reporting an overdose. Narrow, so it scores as a partial rather than a full liberalisation. |
| SB 3 89R | Consumable hemp and hemp-derived cannabinoids | -2 | Prohibited consumable hemp products containing intoxicating THC. The Governor vetoed it as a measure that 'would never go into effect', the Lieutenant Governor described the Senate as having 'passed SB 3 to ban all forms of intoxicating THC', and the House floor debate was argued throughout as a ban. |
| SB 5 891 | Consumable hemp, first called session | -2 | The special-session successor to Senate Bill 3, to prohibit consumable hemp products containing any amount of any form of THC. |
| SB 6 892 | Consumable hemp, second called session | -2 | Same subject and same effect as Senate Bills 3 and 5, in the second called session. |
Bills deliberately not scored
Votes on these appear on candidate pages but move no number. Where a direction is genuinely arguable, the honest thing is to show the vote and score nothing.
- HB 513 88R — Increases the penalty for manufacture or delivery of a controlled substance causing death or serious bodily injury. That is an overdose-death measure, not a question about lawful cannabis access, and scoring it either way would misrepresent the vote.
- HB 2818 88R — Hemp production and research permits. An agricultural measure whose direction on consumer access is not clear from the bill.
- HB 3948 87R — Hemp and consumable hemp production and regulation. Read as an industry framework rather than an access measure; the direction is arguable, so it is not scored.
- HB 4918 88R — Processing, manufacture and sale of hemp products for smoking. Arguably expansive and arguably a restriction on an existing market, so it is not scored.
- HR 5371 US — The shutdown-ending appropriations package. It carried a hemp provision, but a vote on it was a vote on funding the federal government, not a standalone cannabis vote — our own summary of it says so. Scoring it either way would misread almost every member who voted.
- HR 7212 US — Hemp Enforcement, Modernization, and Protection Act. It both tightens enforcement and protects parts of the market; the net direction on lawful access is arguable, so it is not scored.
- HR 10079 US — Beverage Regulatory Parity Act. Regulates hemp beverages; whether that widens or narrows lawful access depends on the baseline, so it is not scored.
If you think a row is wrong
The bill table is a file in the open: change one row and every score on the site changes with it. If you think a direction is mistaken, the thing to argue with is that row and the reason beside it — not the number on a candidate's page, which is only the arithmetic that follows from it.