Identical Bills Decline to New Low

The number of identical, or nearly identical, bills filed by different legislators has declined drastically from the previous three sessions. Only 19 bills with at least one duplicate were filed this session, the fewest on record since at least 2017 and less than a tenth of the average from 2022 through 2024.

Legislators may file similar bills for many reasons - for example, many duplicates are identical "companion bills" filed separately in the House and Senate, giving a bill two chances to pass. Other nearly identical bills are due to small differences in the language used by legislators. These may have a significant impact on the meaning of the law, or may reflect minor technical differences.

Bills with at least one nearly identical copy

Notes: Similarity of bills is based on text analysis of the bill summary, not the full bill text or changes to the Virginia code. Two or more bills were considered the same, or "semantically similar", if the summary text, as drafted by the Division of Legislative Services, was identical or nearly identical. This semantic similarity is calculated based on variations of the "TF-IDF" and "cosine similarity" algorithms. All bills with nearly identical summaries are grouped together and only counted once in the chart.

Source: Virginia Legislative Information System and VPAP analysis.