The New Mexico Bill Tracker
Track bills you're interested in during the NM legislative session.
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The New Mexico Bill TrackerTrack bills you're interested in during the NM legislative session. |
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The NM Bill Tracker is a free service for following pending legislation in the New Mexico legislature, written by Akkana Peck.
I wrote it because I was frustrated at how difficult it is to find out when bills are actively being considered in the legislature. I wanted something I could use to track bills and send me alerts when important issues are coming up for a vote.
I also want to help make it easier for everybody to keep track of what our government is doing and take an active role in government, to help our state move in the right direction. If you're interested in being more active in New Mexico's government, the NM League of Women Voters has lots of info on the LWVNM Action page (disclaimer: I'm also the webmaster for LWVNM).
The NM Bill Tracker doesn't store any personal information about you. It asks for your email address so it can send you updates on bills. Email addresses are not used for any other purpose, and will never be shared with outside projects or companies, or with other NM Bill Tracker users.
If you don't want email updates and just want to check bill status online with a web browser, you can leave the email field blank.
If you initially provide an email address, then change your mind and decide you don't want email updates after all, go to Settings and make the Email field blank.
No one else can see the bills you put in your list. The only thing you can see involving other users is the number of users following each bill.
Starting in 2025, there's a very similar project called NM LegisWatch, written by Ed Santiago. The two projects are cooperative: Ed and I have shared code and data for the NM legislature for years. The NM Bill Tracker links to some pages on NM LegisWatch, in particular, to the excellent bill and legislator summary pages, and it uses data pulled by NMLegisWatch. The feature sets for the two projects are similar but not identical, so use whichever one suits your needs best ... or use both!
Right now the Bill Tracker only works in New Mexico, but it shouldn't be that hard to extend it to any state that makes bill status available online.
The NM Bill Tracker uses Python's Beautiful Soup module to scrape the New Mexico Legislative website. To use it in another state, you would need a way to get that data for your own state, which might involve web scraping, or (in a few enlightened states) there might be an easier way.
if you're interested in using my Bill Tracker in your state, I'd be happy to work with you to integrate scrapers for other states into the Bill Tracker source code. Drop me a line.
The BillTracker is free open source software, written in Python using Flask. The BillTracker source code is on GitHub. Contributions, bug reports and bug fixes are welcome!
Problems, pet peeves or wish list? Contact Akkana.