Almost everything on this board rests on one fact about Congress that is rarely explained, so we are explaining it. Most votes in Congress are never recorded.
Voice vote
The chair says “all in favour, say aye,” listens to the room, and declares a winner. No names are written down. Most bills pass this way.
Division vote
Members stand up and are counted. You get a total — 240 to 190 — but still no names. You cannot tell which 240.
Roll call — the only one we can use
Every member’s name and their yea or nay is entered permanently into the record. It happens when one fifth of the members present demand it — that rule is in the Constitution, Article I, Section 5. The House Clerk and the Senate Secretary then publish the list, name by name.
So this board can only grade what somebody insisted on recording. If a bill passed on a voice vote, no member’s position on it exists in writing anywhere, and no accountability project can honestly score it. That is not a limitation we chose; it is the shape of the evidence.
Three consequences worth knowing before you read anyone’s grade:
Not the members. A bill faces two separate gates, and a small number of people control the first one.
Gate one
Does it reach the floor?
In the House, the Speaker decides what reaches the floor. Before a bill can even be debated, a committee called the Rules Committee has to issue it what is literally known as “a rule” — a permission slip setting how long debate runs and which amendments, if any, anyone is allowed to offer. The majority party holds a fixed, lopsided share of the seats on that committee no matter how close the chamber is. No permission slip, no vote.
A bill can die earlier than that. A committee chair who simply never schedules a hearing kills it before it is ever debated at all, and nobody has to vote against it.
In the Senate, the Majority Leader is recognised first by custom, which in practice sets the agenda. And most legislation needs 60 votes to end debate before it can get a final vote at all — so 41 senators can stop a bill the other 59 support.
The House has one escape hatch: a discharge petition. Get 218 signatures and a bill is forced to the floor over leadership’s objection. It almost never succeeds, because signing one means publicly defying your own party’s leadership.
Gate two
Is the vote written down?
This one is not controlled by leadership. Any one fifth of the members present can demand the yeas and nays, and then every name goes into the record. That is the constitutional protection in Article I, Section 5, and it is why an opposition minority can always force its opponents on record for a bill that reaches the floor.
Nominations are different. Since rule changes in 2013 and 2017, confirmations need only a simple majority — no 60-vote threshold. That is why judges and agency heads get recorded votes even when legislation stalls, and part of why confirmations have become the most reliable way to change policy without passing a law.
So the most consequential decision is often the decision not to vote. A bill that dies in committee, or that leadership never schedules, leaves no member on record — not for it, not against it. Nobody can be held to a position they were never allowed to take. That is invisible to any accountability project built on votes, including this one, and it is worth naming rather than pretending otherwise.
It is also why the gaps on this board are not only our gaps. When a whole rubric dimension has no votes in it, that sometimes means we have not finished mapping. It sometimes means Congress never voted.
What we hold, as distinct from what we score
The rubric above is a hand-written list of 48 measures. It decides what can be scored — and because it was written by hand, it also decided what we ever looked at. That is a limit we put there, not one the record imposes.
So we stopped starting from it. Every roll call in the 113th–119th Congress is now being classified against the Labora Rounds domains directly — 12,275 classifications so far, of which 9,036 carry a domain and 3,239 are captured but not yet placed.
None of it touches a grade. Capturing a vote and scoring a vote are different acts: scoring still requires an approved measure in the rubric, reviewed first. This is the record of what Congress voted on, which you are entitled to see whether or not we have finished judging it.
For scale: counting both chambers, Congress took roughly 1,500 to 1,950 recorded votes in each of those two-year windows — 1,945 in 2021–22, 1,824 in 2015–16, 1,528 so far in 2025–26. Most are procedural and could never be rubric measures. But the gap between what Congress recorded and what we have scored is the honest size of the work left, and it is ours to close, not a limit of the record. Counted from VoteView’s roll-call files on 8 August 2026.