About This Project

It started with one bill: the “Power Bill Reduction Act.” The name sounded great. Who wouldn't want lower power bills? But when I read the actual text, I found the opposite: a bill that lets Duke Energy raise your electric rates 39-73% by passing construction costs to ratepayers before plants are even built. The governor vetoed it. The legislature's supermajority overrode the veto anyway.

That made me wonder: how many other bills are hiding behind names that sound good but do the opposite? So I scraped every bill with a roll call vote from the last two legislative sessions and compared the titles to what the bills actually do, using the legislature's own nonpartisan staff summaries as the source of truth.

The answer: it's not just one bill. It's a pattern. Misleading names aren't accidents. They're a strategy to avoid accountability. This site exists to surface that pattern.

Misled tracks NC General Assembly bills whose official titles don't match what they actually do. Every bill on this site was passed by the legislature, and every claim is sourced to ncleg.gov, the state's own records.

“I don't editorialize the data. I surface it.”

All bills that received roll call votes in the 2023–2024 and 2025–2026 sessions are screened. Each bill's official title is compared to the nonpartisan staff summary written by the NCGA's own legislative analysts. Bills are rated on a 1–5 scale for how well their title represents their content. Only bills rated 3 or higher (after human review) appear on this site.

Bills rated 1 or 2 are not published. Ratings are assigned by the project and reviewed manually before publication.

Some bills on this site carry a Stowaway label. These are bills where unrelated provisions were hidden inside legislation with a different stated purpose.

Think of a hurricane relief bill that also quietly changes election law, or a routine budget bill that rewrites environmental regulations. The original bill is legitimate, but controversial provisions are tucked inside because they'd face more scrutiny as standalone legislation. The bill becomes a vehicle, and the stowaways ride along.

This is different from a misleading title. A bill can have an accurate title and still contain stowaway provisions. Both are ways that the legislative process obscures what's actually happening.

North Carolina's governor can veto bills, but the legislature can override any veto with a 3/5 supermajority: 30 of 50 votes in the Senate, 72 of 120 in the House. The current legislature holds veto-proof supermajorities in both chambers, which means the governor's veto is effectively symbolic on many bills.

Understanding this dynamic is essential to understanding why misleadingly named bills become law.

This site was built by Andy Bowline, candidate for NC Senate District 31. It's part of a broader effort to make North Carolina's legislative process more transparent and accessible to voters.

The data covers all NC legislators, not just District 31. If you're a voter, journalist, or candidate anywhere in NC, this information is for you.

andycantwin.com →

All legislative data comes from ncleg.gov, the NC General Assembly's official website. Bill summaries are written by nonpartisan NCGA staff, not by this project. Vote records are official roll call transcripts. News sources are linked where available for additional context.

All data on this site is derived from public government records. If you'd like to use this data for your own civic projects, go ahead.