VAPLAN began in the 2018 legislative session with the dual goals of 1) bringing positive attention and support to legislators who were writing progressive legislation; and 2) encouraging activist groups to make their voices heard to their legislators on progressive legislation. To that end, we tracked legislation, and created alerts to notify voters across the state when a bill would be heard by their legislator. We spoke loudly in opposition to guns in churches, EMTs carrying guns, increased scrutiny of voter IDs, constitutional conventions; and loudly supported redistricting reform, ending school lunch shaming, banning child labor on tobacco farms, ERA, no excuse absentee voting, an increase in the felony larceny threshold, banning gay conversion therapy, and obviously we worked hard in the fight for Medicaid expansion.
At the end of session, we had a small handful of bills that we urged Governor Northam to veto, and we launched a fun project to send him “veto pens” along with a request to veto.
Lastly, after session was over, we looked at which legislators voted how on the progressive bills that we cared about, and summarized those results in the VAPLAN legislative scorecard. One Senator (Jennifer Wexton) and one Delegate (Alfonso Lopez) had a perfect score, voting the way we hoped on every bill.
Last year’s alerts can be found here. http://old.vaplan.us/alerts.html
More details on the 2018 VAPLAN legislative scorecard here: http://old.vaplan.us/index.html