Review of legislative session

The Arkansas Citizens First Congress (CFC) released its 2013 Vote Guide today, which assesses legislators’ voting records for the 2013 session.

This guide compares votes taken by legislators on 37 bills related to the CFC’s Ten Priorities for a Better Arkansas and our broad platform. The overall scores reflect the percentage of the time a legislator voted with the CFC position on the bills we worked on. Scores ranged from a high of 89% to a low of 19% in the House; and from 82% to 33% in the Senate.

Legislators are also scored for votes in individual issue areas in the Guide: Civil Rights; Economic Development and Justice; Education; Election and Government Reform; Environment; and Public Health.

The CFC hopes this Vote Guide is useful for seeing how your legislators voted. This guide does not endorse or condemn any legislator—it simply illustrates how legislators tend to vote. There are many other complexities that are impossible to put in a voting chart. We thank all legislators for their important and difficult work, even when we disagree.

The CFC saw many successes this legislative session, including passage of health care expansion, energy legislation to create jobs and help the environment, positive reforms in education and elections, and protections for landowners in the Fayetteville Shale.

However, the legislature also passed bills targeting women’s rights, voting rights, and environmental regulation, and the unfair tax cuts will place more of the burden on middle and low-income working families who already pay twice the effective rate of wealthy Arkansans.




The Arkansas Citizens First Congress is a 56-member multi-issue coalition with diverse membership from grassroots community groups, advocacy organizations, and institutional allies from across the state of Arkansas. CFC members advocate at the Capitol for legislation to improve the lives of all Arkansans.