Discontinuing state-level legislative tracking

Today I’m turning the lights off on GovTrack’s state-level legislative tracking pages.

I added state-level legislative tracking in 2012, through a partnership with LegiNation, Inc. and LegiScan, Inc., with some additional data from Open States. This meant you could get email updates on bills going through your state legislature, besides bills in the U.S. Congress.

In practice, however, I wasn’t able to dedicate enough time to this aspect of the site to bring it to a level of quality that I was comfortable with. In short, it wasn’t working. These pages weren’t getting much use either, accounting for about 1% of site traffic.

There are more than 100 state-level legislative bodies: Two in every state except Nebraska, Nebraska’s unicameral legislature, the Council of the District of Columbia, and governing bodies in Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories. Each of these bodies has a different legislative process, and so the level of effort to make good legislative tracking for 100+ legislative bodies was far more than we could tackle here.

Discontinuing the state-level pages will free up some time for us to focus more on what we do best.

If you were a user of the state-level pages on GovTrack, I’d recommend taking a look at LegiNation, LegiScan, and Open States.