How the Alabama scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the Legislature's own records on ALISON, its public site (alison.legislature.state.al.us): each House and Senate floor roll call, with every member's vote by name. We use every floor roll call of the 2025 and 2026 Regular Sessions and the 2026 First Special Session, 4,897 roll calls (2,569 in the House, 2,328 in the Senate), Feb. 6, 2025 to May 8, 2026. The Legislature's four-year term began in November 2022; these pages cover its last two years.
• A roll call's record gives its counts and each member's vote, but not what was voted on or the day. Those come from the bills' histories, which name each roll call by number beside the action it decided (“Motion to Read a Third Time and Pass – Adopted Roll Call 573”), with the day. Where the history's wording names the roll call, that number is used: now and then the history's number field is off by one, and every tally is checked against the record.
• We leave out roll calls we can't place: 90 that no bill's history names, and 9 whose history gives only the bill's status (“In Conference Committee”), not what was decided. We also leave out the House's 37 roll calls for adding cosponsors to a bill: members ask to join a bill by roll call, which isn't a vote on a question. Committee votes and voice votes aren't included.
• Budget isolation resolutions. Until the education and general fund budgets have passed, Alabama's Constitution lets a chamber pass another bill only after it adopts, by a three-fifths vote, a budget isolation resolution for that bill (Constitution of 2022, Article IV, Section 71.01). Each is a roll call of its own, so many bills have two: the resolution, then passage (924 in the House and 692 in the Senate). A resolution adopted for two bills at once is one roll call, and its page names both bills.
• Local certification resolutions. Right after many local bills pass, the chamber votes on a resolution its records call a “Local Certification Resolution”. The Legislature's published rules don't describe it, so the vote pages name it as the records do (38 in the House, 39 in the Senate).
• Members vote yea, nay or abstain. The record marks a member who doesn't vote “P” (pass), whether they were in the chamber or not; it gives no reason. An abstention counts as a vote, as “Present” does on the Congress pages; see didn't vote.
• A roll call is used only if its members' votes add up to the counts it prints and it lists every member serving that day exactly once. One exception: for 322 House roll calls in the 2026 session, from Representative Kristin Nelson's first day, February 5, 2026, the record counts 105 votes but names 104 members, leaving her out. Every other member serving is named, so the one vote the counts hold beyond the names is hers, and it's credited to her.
• As a check from a second source, each roll call's yeas and nays are compared with the yeas and nays the bill's history prints beside the action: 3,283 of 3,283 agree.
• Each vote page shows whether the motion was adopted or lost, as the history marks it.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 187 in the House and 139 in the Senate. Every roll call has its own page. Floor votes lists the contested and party-line ones, and every roll call on request.

Who cast each vote

• The records name each member, with no ID. Each name is tied to exactly one legislator who served in that chamber this term, by the names Open States records for them (two members are on the records under a fuller name: “William Brock Colvin”, Brock Colvin, and “Gregory Barnes”, Greg Barnes), and we check that the legislator held the seat that day. Every vote on every roll call used matched.
• Names and terms come from Open States. Where its records differ from the Legislature's, we follow the Legislature's own roll calls and the sources they point to: Representative Randall Shedd resigned on February 17, 2025, Corey Harbison on April 15, 2025, and Cynthia Almond on June 15, 2025, as the Governor's office and the press record them; Representative Cindy Myrex was sworn in on October 28, 2025; and Matt Woods represented House District 13 until he was sworn in to the Senate on June 27, 2025. Representative Norman Crow took his seat on January 14, 2026, but the House's roll calls of January 15 to 20 neither name him nor count a vote for him, so his record starts with the roll calls of January 21.
• Each build checks our current members against the Legislature's own member records on ALISON, names and parties.
• Photos are the official portraits from ALISON. A member without one shows initials.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President pro Tempore

• Alabama's presiding officers vote like any member: the Speaker of the House, Nathaniel Ledbetter (District 24), and the Senate's President pro Tempore, its elected leader, Garlan Gudger (District 4). Each held the office for every roll call here. The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate but isn't a senator.
• The score is the share of roll calls on which the member voted the same way, yea or nay, as their chamber's leader. A roll call counts only when both of them voted yea or nay. The Speaker voted yea or nay on 2,302 of 2,569 House roll calls (nay on 7); the President pro Tempore on 2,265 of 2,328 Senate roll calls (nay on 19).
• Republicans hold both chambers, so both leaders are Republicans.
• The headline number uses contested votes. On unanimous votes nearly everyone agrees with the leader, so the share on all votes, shown alongside, is high for almost everyone.
• A score needs at least 20 votes. The leaders aren't scored against themselves.
• This works like “votes with the President” on the Congress pages, with one difference: the President's position on a bill comes from the White House's public statements, while the leader's position here is the leader's own recorded vote.

Votes with own party

• Counts party-line votes: roll calls where most Democrats voted one way and most Republicans the other (143 in the House, 116 in the Senate). The score is the share of those votes where the member voted with most of their own party. The Congress pages use the same definition.
• Partisan rank orders each chamber's current members by this score, whichever their party: 1 votes with their party most often, and the last votes with it least. Members shown with the same whole percent share a rank, and each legislator's page says how many share it and how many vote with their party more often.
• A score needs at least 20 party-line votes.
• The table of contested votes on each legislator's page marks every contested vote where they voted against most of their party, whether or not it was a party-line vote, so it can list more votes than the score counts.

Didn't vote at roll call

• The share of roll calls, while the member was in office, on which the record marks them “P” (pass): they didn't vote yea, nay or abstain.
• The record gives no reason: a member who was absent, excused or in the chamber without voting is marked the same way. So these pages say “didn't vote”, never “missed” or “excused”.
• An abstention is a vote: the member pressed “abstain”. Alabama's members abstain often (42,977 abstentions in the House and 129 in the Senate across these roll calls), and an abstention isn't counted as not voting. It doesn't count for or against the leader or the party either: those scores count yeas and nays only.
• “In office” means the roll call lists the member: each one lists every seated member, whether or not they voted.

The seat chart

• Each chamber's current members are seats, ordered from most liberal (left) to most conservative (right). There's no DW-NOMINATE score for state legislators, so the order comes from the Legislature's own contested votes: for every pair of members, the share of contested roll calls on which they voted the same way, scaled to one left-right dimension (Poole's agreement-score method, the usual first step of roll-call scaling). Republicans are on the right. A member with fewer than 20 contested votes sits at their party's middle.
• Color uses the same rule as the Congress pages: how often a member crosses party lines toward the middle on party-line votes, siding with the other party alongside their own party's more moderate members. Solid blue or red means almost never; purple means at least 1 in 5 of those votes.
• Alabama legislators break from their party on party-line votes more often than members of Congress (one in ten breaks on at least 10.3% of them, against 7.4% in Congress), about as often as Pennsylvania's and New Jersey's, so the Alabama pages use the same color steps as those states, twice Congress's: purple at 20% rather than 10%, then 15, 10, 6 and 3%. That keeps purple for the truly moderate.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill of the 2025 and 2026 Regular Sessions and the 2026 First Special Session, from ALISON: 1,264 House bills and 722 Senate bills. Resolutions aren't counted, and neither are bills that propose an amendment to the Constitution (32), which go to the voters, not the Governor.
• A bill counts for its sponsor, the one the Legislature names for it, by its own member ID. Cosponsors aren't counted.
• Passed both chambers: the bill was enrolled (417 House bills, 288 Senate bills). It became law when it got an Act number, signed by the Governor or law without her signature; Governor Ivey vetoed none of these bills. One didn't become law: SB 240 of 2026 (remote participation in parole hearings) died when the Legislature adjourned without acting on the Governor's executive amendment (Alabama Reflector, April 23, 2026); its history ends at “Delivered to Governor”. Each build checks that each year's Act numbers run without a gap, each on exactly one bill or joint resolution: Acts 1 to 456 in 2025 and 1 to 613 in 2026.
• Local bills. Many Alabama bills apply to one county or city (a local law). The Legislature sends each to a local legislation committee: the House's or the Senate's Local Legislation committee, or the committee of the county's delegation (“Jefferson County Legislation”). A bill first sent to one of those is counted as local (232 of the bills that passed); local bills are counted and shown, but the ranked number is statewide bills that passed both chambers.
• Ranks are among current members of the chamber, and among current members of the chamber in the same party: 1 has the most, and members with the same number share a rank. Members who took office during the term had less time to pass bills, and the chairs of the budget committees sponsor the budget bills.

Budget projects

• Alabama's budgets don't name the legislator who asked for an item, so there's no budget figure for Alabama legislators.

The November 3 ballot

• All 105 House seats and all 35 Senate seats are on the ballot: Alabama elects both chambers together every four years. The candidates are the ones the Secretary of State certified for the general election: each party's nominee, chosen in the May 19 primary or the June 16 runoff, and the independent candidates who qualified by petition.
• The Republican nominees are from the Alabama Republican Party's amended certification of August 28, 2026 (it adds House District 51, left off its June list) and, for Senate District 25, its certification of September 2. The Democratic nominees and the independent candidates are from the Secretary of State's certifications of August 26, 2026; those are scanned documents, so their rows were copied by hand and each checked against the page.
• Senate Districts 25 and 26: a federal court ordered new lines for these two Montgomery-area districts in November 2025, and on May 29, 2026 the federal appeals court let Alabama keep its 2021 map. The Governor reopened qualifying for the two districts; with one candidate per party or fewer, no special primary was needed. The races use the same lines as every other district, the ones the map and the address lookup use.
• Alabama prints a candidate with no opponent on the ballot, with a line for a write-in. Write-in candidates aren't named.
• The certifications don't mark incumbents, so a candidate is shown as the incumbent when the name on the ballot is the seat holder's (the surname, and a first name or nickname). A candidate who serves in the Legislature now links to their voting record.

Bill explanations

Alabama vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the bill's short title from the Legislature's own records, and the page links to the bill on ALISON, where its full text, fiscal notes and history are.

Data sources and downloads

Everything these pages show can be downloaded, free to reuse. Percent columns ending in “_shown” are the whole numbers the pages show; the counts behind each one are beside it. Terms of reuse

• members.csv: Every Alabama legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every Alabama floor roll call with its totals, whether it was contested or party-line, how the leader and each party's majority voted, and the official record.
• member-votes-house-1.csv: How every Alabama House member voted on each floor roll call, Feb. 6, 2025 to April 2, 2026 (part 1 of 2).
• member-votes-house-2.csv: How every Alabama House member voted on each floor roll call, April 7, 2026 to May 8, 2026 (part 2 of 2).
• member-votes-senate.csv: How every Alabama Senate member voted on each floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every Alabama bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: Alabama House: current members match the chamber's own list — 105 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Alabama Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 35 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Alabama: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 1,986 sponsor credits on 1,986 bills
• PASS: Alabama: every bill's sponsor matched to one legislator, every passed bill's outcome known — all of them
• PASS: Alabama: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes-house-1.csv, member-votes-house-2.csv, member-votes-senate.csv
• PASS: Alabama: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 140 seats
• PASS: Alabama: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Alabama: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Alabama: every vote page's bill has its title — 4897 votes
• PASS: Alabama: every current legislator has an official portrait — 145 portraits
• PASS: Alabama: the district map has every seat, and only those — 105 House districts, 35 Senate districts
• PASS: Alabama: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Alabama: every roll call's votes add up to its printed counts and it lists every member serving once — all of them
• PASS: Alabama: the yeas and nays the bills' histories print agree with the roll calls — 3,283 of 3,283 agree
• PASS: Alabama: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 140 races