Methodology & disclosures

Roll-call votes come from the roll-call documents published by the Office of the Clerk of the House and by the Senate. Member identity, party, district and dates of service come from the public-domain congress-legislators dataset. Bill titles and sponsorship come from the Congress.gov API. Hearing schedules come from published committee notices.

Every page links the exact documents behind it, with the time each was read. If a figure here disagrees with the primary record, the primary record is right.

A roll call appears here after the vote closes and the chamber publishes the document. Neither chamber publishes a running count while a vote is open, so this site cannot show one and does not pretend to. A vote taken minutes ago may not appear yet.

All times are US Eastern, the zone Congress schedules and votes in. A vote held at 23:40 Eastern belongs to that legislative day, not the following one.

Both chambers occasionally revise a roll-call document after publication to correct how a member was recorded. Revisions are picked up and every affected figure is recomputed. Where the source publishes a revision date, it is shown.

A vote is party-line when a majority of voting Democrats and a majority of voting Republicans took opposite positions. Only yea and nay count toward a party's majority; present and not voting are not positions on the question. A party that splits exactly evenly has no majority position, and the vote is then excluded from every figure below.

This matters more than it sounds. Most of the congressional calendar is unanimous or near-unanimous — suspensions, procedural motions, naming post offices. Scoring agreement across all votes measures the calendar rather than the member, and pushes everyone toward 100%.

Of the party-line votes on which a member cast a yea or nay, the share where they took their own party's majority position.

Reported only when a member has at least 10 such votes. Below that, a percentage swings by twenty points on a single vote, and we show nothing rather than a number that looks precise and is not.

Not reported for independents. The roll-call feeds do not record which party an independent caucuses with, so any figure would be our inference presented as their record.

A member crosses party lines when they cast a yea or nay against their own party's majority position on a party-line vote.

Abstaining is not crossing. Voting present, or not voting, is not counted as opposition to the member's party — it is not a position on the question at all.

The share of roll calls, held while the member held their seat, on which they are recorded as not voting.

Two deliberate choices. Voting present counts as a vote cast, because it is a deliberate position rather than an absence. And the denominator is only votes held while the member was seated — a member sworn in halfway through a congress is not marked absent for the votes held before they arrived.

A member's party is shown as the roll-call document recorded it on the day of that vote. When a member changes party mid-congress, their earlier votes continue to show the affiliation they held at the time, because that is how the vote was recorded.

Each measure carries two things: the verbatim latest action published by the chamber, and a coarse rung derived from it so the list can be sorted and counted. Where the two seem to disagree, the verbatim text is authoritative — the rung is our summary of it, not a separate fact.

A measure that never left committee stays at “in committee” even after the congress ends. “Failed” is reserved for a measure that died on a recorded vote, because expiry and defeat are different outcomes and only one of them is a decision anybody made.

The cosponsor count shown is the one the upstream reports. Where the synced roster is shorter, both numbers are shown rather than quietly reporting the roster length as the truth.

Disclosures are STOCK Act periodic transaction reports. A filer checks a bracket — the form has no field for an amount — so every amount shown here is the range the filing states. No single figure is ever presented as a disclosed amount.

Nothing is summed into a holding, a position, a portfolio or a return. A periodic transaction report records transactions; adding brackets together would produce a balance sheet nobody filed. The one derived figure is estimated ticker volume — a sum of bracket midpoints, used to order the most-traded list — and it is labelled “est.” everywhere it appears. The true total lies anywhere between the sums of the brackets’ floors and ceilings.

Disclosure lag is the number of days from the transaction to the date the filing was received. A filing with no recorded receipt date has an unknown lag and is counted separately — never as a lag of zero. The median is reported rather than the mean, because a handful of filings arrive years late and a mean would describe a typical filing as far slower than any typical filing is.

A filing is counted late when that lag exceeds 45 days. The STOCK Act also allows 30 days from the member learning of a transaction, which no public record discloses, so 45 days from the transaction is the latest deadline any reading of the statute permits. A filing at 40 days may be perfectly timely and is not counted late here.

Transactions in a spouse’s or dependent child’s account are labelled as such. They are disclosures about a different person, and folding them into the member without saying so would misreport them. A filing whose filer cannot be matched to a seated member is not shown at all rather than attributed to a guess.

None of this is evidence of wrongdoing. Members are required to file these reports; that they exist is the system working.

If something here is wrong, it is worth telling us about — a derived figure with a bad definition is wrong for every member at once. The underlying definitions live in the open in this site's source.