Bill version tracking

The problem this solves

Legislative review has an obvious failure — missing a bill entirely — and a quieter one that catches more people. A bill is read in week two, judged harmless, and closed. In week six it is substituted in committee and comes back with different obligations and a different fiscal effect. The number on it has not changed. Nobody re-reads it, because nobody had a reason to.

Organizations rarely get caught by the bill they never saw. They get caught by the one they cleared.

How CivicRelay handles it

• Every published version of a bill is stored, not overwritten — the history is what makes comparison possible at all.
• Each version is fingerprinted, so a genuinely new version is distinguished from a republication of the same text.
• Each new version is diffed against the one before it, with the changed language shown inline rather than described.
• The change is rated: trivial, minor, major or critical.
• Only major and critical changes trigger a re-review notification, sent to the reviewer who handled the bill before.
• The AI summary and impact analysis are tied to the version they were generated from, so analysis of superseded text is never quietly presented as current.

Why severity matters more than alerts

The easy version of this feature notifies on every change, which trains everyone to ignore it. By the third "HB 112 has been updated" for a renumbered subsection, the alert is noise, and the one that mattered arrives into a mailbox that has stopped reading them.

So severity is the product, not the diff. A formatting change and a new penalty provision are not the same event and are not treated as one. Re-review is reserved for changes substantive enough to plausibly overturn a decision someone already made — which is what keeps the notification worth opening.

What you can see

For any bill: the full list of versions with dates, an inline diff between any version and the one before it, the severity rating for each change, and the original text from the legislature one click away. The organization-wide view shows every bill with a major or critical change this session, so a coordinator can answer "what moved while I was in budget meetings?" without opening each bill.

More on how analysis stays tied to the right version is on how it works.