Most votes in Congress are never written down by name. That is the most important thing to know about this board, so we start with it.
Voice vote
The chair asks for ayes and nos, listens to the room, and picks the winner. No names are written down. Most bills pass this way.
Division vote
Members stand up and are counted. You get a total, like 240 to 190, but no names. You cannot tell who the 240 were.
Roll call — the only one we can use
Every member’s name and their yes or no is written into the record for good. It happens when one fifth of the members in the room ask for it. The Constitution says so, in Article I, Section 5. Then Congress publishes the list, name by name.
So we can only grade votes that someone asked to record. If a bill passed by voice vote, no member’s position was written down anywhere, and no one can honestly score it. We did not choose that limit. It is how the record works.
Three things to know before you read anyone’s grade:
Mostly not the members. A few leaders decide which bills get a vote. But once a bill does get a vote, a small group can force every name onto the record.
Gate one
Does it reach the floor?
In the House, the Speaker decides which bills get a vote. Before a bill can even be debated, the Rules Committee has to give it “a rule”: a permission slip that says how long debate lasts and which changes anyone may offer. The majority party always holds most of the seats on that committee. No permission slip, no vote.
A bill can die even sooner. If a committee chair never holds a hearing, the bill is dead, and nobody had to vote against it.
In the Senate, the Majority Leader speaks first by custom, which in practice sets the schedule. And most bills need 60 votes just to end debate before a final vote. So 41 senators can stop a bill the other 59 support.
The House has one way around its leaders: a discharge petition. If 218 members sign it, the bill gets a vote even if leaders object. It almost never works, because signing means publicly going against your own party’s leaders.
Gate two
Is the vote written down?
Leaders do not control this one. Any one fifth of the members in the room can ask for a recorded vote, and then every name goes on the record. The Constitution protects this, which is why the minority party can always put the other side on record once a bill gets a vote.
Confirmations are different. Since rule changes in 2013 and 2017, confirming a judge or official takes only a simple majority, not 60 votes. That is why those votes keep happening even when bills stall, and why confirmations have become the surest way to change policy without passing a law.
So the biggest decision is often the decision not to vote. A bill that never gets a vote leaves no one on record, for it or against it. No scorecard built on votes can see that, including ours, so we say it out loud.
That is also why some gaps on this board are not only ours. When a subject has no votes in it, sometimes we have not finished adding them. Sometimes Congress never voted.
What we have, beyond what we grade
Our rules list 48 measures. They decide what can be graded. We wrote that list by hand, so it also shaped what we looked at. That limit is ours, not the record’s.
So we also sort every recorded vote since 2013 by subject, whether or not it counts toward a grade. So far: 12,275 sorted, 9,036 placed in a subject, and 3,239 still to place.
None of this changes a grade. To count, a vote still has to fit a rule we approved first. This is simply the record of what Congress voted on, and you have a right to see it.
For scale: counting both chambers, Congress takes about 1,500 to 1,950 recorded votes in each two-year term: 1,945 in 2021–22, 1,824 in 2015–16, and 1,528 so far in 2025–26. Most are about how Congress runs and could never be on our list. But the gap between what Congress recorded and what we have scored is the work we still have to do. Counted from VoteView’s roll-call files on 8 August 2026.