About this project

This guide is an effort to make the quantifiable aspects of the Montana Legislature more accessible to the public. It compiles information about lawmakers, proposed bills and the legislative process, along with contextual information that can help Montana citizens make sense of the work their elected representatives are doing in Helena. This is a project of Montana Free Press, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit newsroom that aims to provide Montanans with in-depth, nonpartisan news coverage.

The data presented here is sourced primarily from the Montana Legislature’s official roster and its official bill-tracking system, the Legislative Automated Workflow System, or LAWS. Data from LAWS is collected daily using an open-source scraping script developed by the Open States project.

Web design, data wrangling and other reporting for this guide was done by MTFP data reporter Eric Dietrich. Contact edietrich@montanafreepress.org with bug reports, questions or suggestions.