ABOUT & METHODOLOGY

Where every number comes from

Capitol Tally makes it easy to see how members of the U.S. Congress actually vote. It is independent, nonpartisan, and built entirely on official public records.

Where the data comes from

Votes — the official roll-call records published by the U.S. House Clerk and the U.S. Senate.
Members & bills — the Library of Congress (Congress.gov) and the community-maintained unitedstates/congress-legislators dataset, which is also the source of member portraits.

How often it updates

An automated job runs nightly, pulling the current roster and the latest roll calls into the database. Vote tallies and member records typically reflect the previous legislative day.

How the numbers are counted

Election dates come from each seat’s current term: a seat is on the ballot at the last general election before its term ends. Appointed senators’ seats go to a special election, as the official roster records.
Vacant House seats are the districts in the 2020 Census apportionment that no sitting member holds.
Missed votes are roll calls a member was seated for and is recorded as “not voting”. An absence is an unbroken run of them, counted in votes: a recess has no votes to miss, so it neither breaks nor lengthens one. The record shows the count, not the reason.
Voting with the party means voting yea or nay the same way as most of the member’s own party on that roll call. Present and not-voting are neither.

Scope & known limitations

Coverage is the current Congress — the 535 voting members of the House and Senate. Former members and earlier Congresses are not yet included.
A vote shown as “not voting” reflects the official record and may mean an absence, a recusal, or a vacant seat.
Not every roll call is on a bill — many are procedural motions or nominations, which are labeled by their question rather than a bill title.
A small number of members may be temporarily missing from a vote’s roster while their identifiers are reconciled across data sources.

Corrections

This is an independent project and not affiliated with any government body. If something looks wrong, it almost certainly traces back to one of the sources above — which is where to verify the official record.

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How the numbers are counted

Election dates come from each seat’s current term: a seat is on the ballot at the last general election before its term ends. Appointed senators’ seats go to a special election, as the official roster records.

Vacant House seats are the districts in the 2020 Census apportionment that no sitting member holds.

Missed votes are roll calls a member was seated for and is recorded as “not voting”. An absence is an unbroken run of them, counted in votes: a recess has no votes to miss, so it neither breaks nor lengthens one. The record shows the count, not the reason.

Voting with the party means voting yea or nay the same way as most of the member’s own party on that roll call. Present and not-voting are neither.

Scope & known limitations

Coverage is the current Congress — the 535 voting members of the House and Senate. Former members and earlier Congresses are not yet included.

A vote shown as “not voting” reflects the official record and may mean an absence, a recusal, or a vacant seat.

Not every roll call is on a bill — many are procedural motions or nominations, which are labeled by their question rather than a bill title.

A small number of members may be temporarily missing from a vote’s roster while their identifiers are reconciled across data sources.