How the California scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the Legislature's public database, which the Legislative Counsel publishes for anyone to download: each floor roll call with every member's vote by name. We use every Assembly and Senate floor roll call of the 2025–26 Regular Session and its First Extraordinary Session, 7,683 roll calls (4,006 in the Assembly, 3,677 in the Senate), Dec. 2, 2024 to Sept. 1, 2026. The Legislature adjourned on August 31, 2026; a few roll calls taken after midnight that night are dated September 1, as the records date them.
• A roll call is used only if its members' ayes and noes add up to the counts the record prints and it lists every member serving that day exactly once. All of them did. In one, the database and the Assembly's Journal, the official record, disagree: on SB 329 on August 25, 2026, the Journal (page 6478) lists Assembly Member Diane Dixon among the 77 ayes, and the database's own count is 77, but its list of members has her not voting. We follow the Journal.
• Members may add a vote after a roll call closes, by unanimous consent and only if it doesn't change the outcome. Those votes are part of the final record, which is what's counted here, as the Journals print it.
• Each bill on a consent calendar gets its own roll call, so those count like any other; they're nearly all unanimous. Committee votes aren't included. Neither are voice votes, which don't record how each member voted.
• California passes a bill with a majority of all members (41 in the Assembly, 21 in the Senate), or two-thirds (54 and 27) for an urgency measure, a tax increase and some others, not a majority of those voting. So a bill can fail with more ayes than noes: 14 roll calls here failed. Each vote page shows the result as the record marks it.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the ayes and noes: 880 in the Assembly and 869 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 as the Legislature does on bills, by surname or, where two members share one, with a first name (“Jeff Gonzalez”, “Mark González”). Each name goes to its district in the Legislature's list of members for the session, and the district on the day of the vote to the legislator who held it. Every name on every roll call matched exactly one legislator.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on California legislators. Where it differs from the Legislature's own records, we follow those: Assembly Member Anamarie Ávila Farías's name as the Legislature spells it, and the days members left office, from the Assembly Journal, the roll calls themselves and news reports from the day.
• Each build checks our current members against the Assembly's and the Senate's own member lists, names and parties.
• Photos are the official portraits from assembly.ca.gov and senate.ca.gov. A member without one shows initials.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President pro Tem

• California's presiding officers vote like any member: the Speaker of the Assembly, Robert Rivas (District 29), and the Senate's President pro Tempore, its elected leader. Mike McGuire (District 2) was pro Tem until Monique Limón (District 21) succeeded him on November 17, 2025; each roll call is compared with whoever held the office that day, and McGuire's own roll calls as pro Tem don't count toward his score. The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate on occasion but isn't a senator and votes only to break a tie.
• The score is the share of roll calls on which the member voted the same way, aye or no, as their chamber's leader. A roll call counts only when both of them voted aye or no. The Speaker voted on 3,988 of 4,006 Assembly roll calls; the pro Tem on 3,625 of 3,677 Senate roll calls.
• California's leaders almost never vote no: the Speaker voted no on 4 roll calls and the pro Tem on 0. When a leader opposes a bill they usually don't vote, and those roll calls don't count here. So this score mostly shows how often a member votes aye on bills their leader voted for.
• 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 (910 in the Assembly, 894 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 shows no vote for them. California's records don't say why: “No Votes Recorded” covers a member who was absent and a member who was there and didn't vote alike, so this share counts both.
• Because a bill needs a majority of all members, not voting has the same effect on the outcome as voting no, and California legislators sometimes don't vote on a bill rather than vote against it. Read a high share with that in mind: it isn't only absence.
• “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 10 of those votes.
• California legislators break from their party on party-line votes less often than members of Congress (one in ten breaks on at least 5.3% of them, against 7.4% in Congress; the median is 0.3% against 1.7%), so the California pages use Congress's color steps: purple at 10%, then 7.5, 5, 3 and 1.5%.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced this session, from the Legislature's public database: 2,811 Assembly bills and 1,451 Senate bills in the regular session and the First Extraordinary Session. Constitutional amendments and joint, concurrent and one-house resolutions aren't counted.
• A bill counts for its primary author, as the Legislature marks it on the bill's last version: who carried it when it passed or died. Joint authors, principal coauthors and coauthors aren't counted, and a committee's bill (287 of them, most of them budget bills) counts for no member.
• Passed both houses: the Legislature presented it to the Governor (1,291 Assembly bills, 786 Senate bills). It became law when the Secretary of State chaptered it, whether the Governor signed it or let it take effect, and didn't if he vetoed it and the veto stood (243 vetoes). These totals match the Governor's: 917 bills in 2025 (794 signed, 123 vetoed) and 1,160 in 2026 (1,040 signed, 120 vetoed).
• California doesn't mark local bills apart (its constitution bars a special law wherever a general one can apply), so every bill counts the same way. The ranked number is bills that passed both houses.
• 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 session had less time to pass bills.

Budget projects

• California's Budget Act doesn't name the legislator who asked for an item, so there's no budget figure for California legislators.

The November 3 ballot

• All 80 Assembly seats and the 20 even-numbered Senate seats are on the ballot; the odd-numbered Senate seats were elected in 2024 for terms to 2028. The candidates are the ones the California Secretary of State certified on August 27, 2026.
• California's primary is top-two: the two candidates with the most votes on June 2 advance, whatever their party, so two candidates of one party can face each other. Where only one candidate ran, the list shows that candidate alone.
• The list marks each incumbent; each one marked is checked against the seat's holder. Write-in candidates aren't named.
• A candidate who serves in the Legislature now links to their voting record.

Bill explanations

California vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the bill's official subject as it stood on the day of the vote, and the page links to the bill on the Legislature's site, where the Legislative Counsel's Digest summarizes what it does.

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 California legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every California 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 California Assembly member voted on each floor roll call, Dec. 2, 2024 to Aug. 17, 2026 (part 1 of 2).
• member-votes-house-2.csv: How every California Assembly member voted on each floor roll call, Aug. 19, 2026 to Aug. 31, 2026 (part 2 of 2).
• member-votes-senate.csv: How every California Senate member voted on each floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every California bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: California House: current members match the chamber's own list — 79 members and 1 vacant seats agree
• PASS: California Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 39 members and 1 vacant seats agree
• PASS: California: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 3,975 sponsor credits on 3,975 bills
• PASS: California: every bill's primary author matched to one legislator, every passed bill's outcome known — all of them
• PASS: California: 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: California: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 120 seats
• PASS: California: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: California: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: California: every vote page's bill has its title — 7683 votes
• PASS: California: every current legislator has an official portrait — 118 portraits
• PASS: California: the district map has every seat, and only those — 80 House districts, 40 Senate districts
• PASS: California: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: California: every roll call's ayes and noes add up to the printed counts and it names every member serving once — all of them (1 vote taken from the Journal where the database differs)
• PASS: California: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 100 races