Legislative Research Department Training Guide - Welcome to Vote Smart!

If at any point in the course of your training (or the internship in general) you have questions about anything you read or are asked to do, please ask your supervisor or another staff member for assistance. It's what we're here for!
Training Guide - Table of Contents
Administrative & Historical Information
Key Vote Selection Criteria
The Legislative Process
Summary Writing
Vote Entering
Helpful Hints Going Forward
Other Projects
Final Note

Administrative Information & Historical Background

Before beginning your internship training, there are a few administrative issues that need to be taken care of. The first thing you should do is note our office's contact information including phone numbers and staff emails. If you have any questions or concerns about any of the policies or procedures described, please bring them to the attention of a staff member immediately. After reading the manual, you need to sign and return to your supervisor the following two documents within the first week of your internship:
To start your training, we want to give you some general background and information about Vote Smart as a whole. Some, but not all, of this information might have been covered in your initial orientation. Please read the following pages:


What Constitutes a Key Vote?

We track legislation in all 50 states, as well as the US Congress, in order to find key votes. We scour through legislative websites, news sources, and legislative journals to track down the important bills that the people want to know about. We rely on the following criteria when selecting a Key Vote (however, it is not a requirement that every Key Vote-candidate satisfy every criteria):

Vote Smart provides a summary of the version of the bill text associated with each selected key vote. Our summaries are written by Vote Smart's staff and interns, who adhere to our strict policies and procedures in order to guarantee absolute impartiality and accuracy. They do not necessarily reflect the content of the final version of the bill, but rather the version voted on in that stage. While many procedural votes take place before a full chamber vote, our voting stages reflect the final reading of each chamber vote. Each key vote selection is reviewed by the project's community of advisors, who are political scientists and journalists from all fifty states.


The Legislative Process

Once you're done reading over the general Vote Smart information, spend some time reading our introduction to the legislative process and the United States House of Representatives description of the legislative process. While reading this (or at any other point in the internship), you may find these glossaries of legislative terms to be useful. Additionally, please review these policy concepts as you may come across them as you read bill texts.



Writing Summaries of Key Votes

Once you have completed these tasks, you will learn how to complete the most substantial work of the Key Votes Department: reading significant pieces of legislation and summarizing their main provisions. Please look over our guide on how to write Key Vote summaries. There is a lot of information in this section, including embedded hyperlinks. Be sure to attentively read all sections and follow all links. The goal is not to write in an exhaustive, overly-technical way, but in a concise and understandable way. This is how a Key Vote summary appears on our website.

Let your supervisor know once you have finished reading all of the above sections. He or she will then give you some training bills for you to write a practice summaries of. You should take your time working on these summaries, and feel free to ask staff any questions you have during the process.



Entering Voting Records and Bill Histories of Key Votes

To begin vote entry training, read over the process we use for entering Key Vote information into our database. These are pages that you will be referring back to often, so there is no reason to try and memorize the content. Instead you should focus on familiarizing yourself with the different resources we have on these pages, especially the "Vote Entry Checklist," "States with Roll Call Numbers," and others. This is how a voting record appears on our website.

Please let a staff member know once you have finished reading over the entering votes guide and all of its subsections. A staff member will give you a bill that you can practice entering votes for in order to make sure you understand the process. Once the practice votes have been completed and reviewed with you by a staff member, you are officially fully trained as a legislative research intern!



Helpful Hints Going Forward

As you perform your work throughout the internship, please refer back frequently to these guides. The departmental work process is complicated and we have lots of specific guidelines that need to be met for every vote and summary; it is impossible to remember every single requirement we have, however the readings you have just completed will help you greatly as you do the work.

Going forward, the best strategy is to ask as many questions as you can. The interns who learn the most and produce the highest quality work are those who ask whenever they are unsure of something. If you have questions about any work process or requirement, please ask a Key Votes staff member. Referring to bill summaries that are already live on the website will also assist you greatly moving forward. The summary writing that is up live has been seen and approved by a staff member, so it illustrates the type of language we prefer in a finished summary. Because we cover so many topics, it is very likely that you will find a bill similar to the one you are working on. Additionally, please read the Going Forward page as it provides a detailed list of what to expect after training and common mistakes and questions that crop up after training.



Other Projects

Throughout the semester, there will be opportunities to complete other projects besides vote entering and summary writing. If at any point in your time here you wish to work on any of these projects, please express your interest to your supervisor and we will try our best to make it happen:



FINAL NOTE

The primary goals of the Key Votes internship program are to increase interns' knowledge of the legislative process and help interns acquire critical thinking and writing skills that will assist them in their careers. To that end, the following learning objectives are proposed for all interns, regardless of whether or not academic credit is sought.

Over the course of the internship program, all Key Votes interns should:














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