How the Delaware scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from legis.delaware.gov, the General Assembly's site: each chamber's list of the term's roll calls, each roll call's record (every member's vote by the name the chamber prints) and its official document, the roll call's PDF. This term is the 153rd General Assembly, whose members took office the day after the November 5, 2024 election: 1,288 floor roll calls (512 in the House, 776 in the Senate), Dec. 16, 2024 to July 1, 2026.
  • December 2024 Senate Executive Session: 0 House and 11 Senate roll calls, Dec. 16, 2024.
  • 2025 Session: 185 House and 311 Senate roll calls, Jan. 14, 2025 to June 30, 2025.
  • 2025 Special Session: 32 House and 37 Senate roll calls, June 30, 2025 to Nov. 13, 2025.
  • November 2025 Extraordinary Session: 3 House and 1 Senate roll calls, Nov. 13, 2025 to Nov. 19, 2025.
  • 2026 Session: 259 House and 365 Senate roll calls, Jan. 13, 2026 to June 30, 2026.
  • 2026 Special Session: 33 House and 51 Senate roll calls, June 30, 2026 to July 1, 2026.
• Each roll call's record must hold the counts the list gives it and add up to them, and must agree with its official document member for member, with the same session, measure and counts (1,831 documents checked). A member who declared a conflict of interest is recorded as not voting, with the conflict noted: these pages show them as abstaining (21 votes). The documents mark some votes with a dot: the Senate's documents' legend says it marks a vote the chair changed (“Chair Changed Vote Type”); the House's carry no legend. 880 votes are marked, 872 of them absences; the record holds each vote as marked, and that's the one counted.
• Each roll call is checked again against the chamber's Journal, the official record of the floor, where it's posted: every House day but March 12, 2026, and the Senate's days from January 14 to April 17, 2025, its executive sessions and January 13 to 20, 2026. 508 House and 111 Senate roll calls match a roll call the Journal prints that day on the same measure with the same counts, and every member the Journal names voting no, not voting or absent voted that way in the record (the Journal names a member who declared a conflict as not voting). The other 669 were taken on days whose Journal isn't posted (4 of them House roll calls). Where the Journal misprints a side, the record and its document are followed and that side isn't compared: Consent Agenda M (June 9, 2026), where the Journal lists Representatives Griffith, Hensley and Postles absent and counts 2 and the roll call's record and document list five absent: those three, D. Short and Michael Smith. The Journal prints 1 side without its names or count (Consent Agenda K, May 12, 2026: “ABSENT”); the rest of that roll call agrees.
• The House adopts most resolutions by voice vote, and its system logs each one as a vote with no counts and no members: 444 of them, which aren't roll calls and aren't included. Neither are committee votes. The Journals also print 2 House roll calls on motions (to suspend the rules, take a bill from the Speaker's table, recess) that the site has no record of: they aren't included. Nor are the Senate's votes on the Governor's nominees, which only its Journals print, in their own form: the posted Journals hold 65, and the rest of the term's aren't posted.
• A consent agenda (the House's) or consent calendar (the Senate's) is one roll call deciding many measures at once; the site records it once per measure, at the same moment, each copy naming the same members the same way. Each is kept once, with every measure it decided: 19 in the House and 87 in the Senate, on 643 measures.
• Not counted, because the chamber rescinded them and voted again: SB 200 (Delaware Senate, June 26, 2025), SA 1 to HCR 74 (Delaware Senate, June 30, 2025), HB 59 w/ HA 1 (Delaware House, May 19, 2026), SS 2 for SB 100 (Delaware House, June 23, 2026), SCR 223 / HCR 149 (Delaware Senate, June 24, 2026).
• What a roll call decided comes from the measure it names: an amendment ("SA 3 to HB 75"), a bill's passage, the chamber where a bill began agreeing to the other chamber's amendments, or a resolution's adoption. A few roll calls are on a motion their document names ("Motion to Table", "Veto Override"). A bill's passage, a chamber's agreeing to the other's amendments and a veto override are a legislator's key votes. Votes on amendments, resolutions and motions are used like any other roll call but aren't key votes.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 138 in the House and 104 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 General Assembly's list of the term's legislators gives each one's name as the roll calls print it ("D. Short", "Kamela Smith", "S. Moore"), chamber, district and party. Each vote goes to the legislator who held that seat that day, and each roll call must name every member serving that day exactly once; the seats it leaves unnamed must be the vacancies it counts. Every name on every roll call used matched exactly one legislator.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on Delaware legislators. Where it differs from the official record, we follow the Journals (3 dates). In the Senate, Sarah McBride (District 1), elected to Congress, and Kyle Evans Gay (District 5), elected Lieutenant Governor, resigned; the Senate received their letters on January 14, 2025, when both seats were vacant, and no Senate roll call fell between December 16, 2024 and that day. Dan Cruce and Ray Seigfried won the seats in special elections on February 15, 2025. In the House, Stell Parker Selby (District 20) resigned; the Speaker's writ of election dates her resignation June 24, 2025. Alonna Berry won the seat on August 5, 2025 and took the oath on August 12. The successors' first days are Open States'; no roll call fell between any departure and the successor's first day.
• No legislator changed parties during the term.
• Each build checks our current members against each chamber's list of its members of 2026-10-23: names, districts and parties.
• Photos are the official pictures legis.delaware.gov shows for each member; a PNG is saved as JPEG.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President Pro Tempore

• Each chamber is measured against the leader it elects from its members, who votes like any member: Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown (District 17), whom the House elected on January 14, 2025, and Senate President Pro Tempore Dave Sokola (District 8), whom the Senate elected on December 16, 2024 and who has led it since 2021. The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate but isn't a senator and casts none of these votes.
• 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 on 511 of 512 House roll calls (nay on 15); the President Pro Tempore on 764 of 776 Senate roll calls (nay on 18).
• 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 (98 in the House, 97 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 them as not voting or absent. The records don't say why a member didn't vote, so these pages count every absence alike and don't say “missed”. A member who declared a conflict of interest abstained, and isn't counted here.
• “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 General Assembly'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.
• Delaware legislators cross party lines on party-line votes about as often as members of Congress: one in ten does so on at least 7.7% of them, against 7.4% in Congress, and the median legislator on 1.9%, against 1.7%. So the Delaware pages use Congress's color steps: purple at 10%, then 7.5, 5, 3 and 1.5%; 6 of the 62 current members scored are purple.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced this term, from the General Assembly's legislation list and each bill's history on legis.delaware.gov: 492 House bills and 374 Senate bills, substitute bills and joint resolutions included. A bill a substitute replaced isn't counted apart: the substitute is the bill. Other resolutions aren't laws and aren't counted.
• A bill counts for its primary sponsor, the member legis.delaware.gov lists first; additional sponsors and co-sponsors aren't counted.
• Passed both chambers: the bill's history records its passage in each (318 House bills, 266 Senate bills). It became law when the Governor signed it or let it become law without signing it, or both chambers passed it over a veto (572 laws, 2 of them over a veto: SB 75, SB 63). 4 were vetoed and the veto stood.
• Delaware amends its Constitution without the Governor or the voters: a bill proposing an amendment must pass both chambers by two-thirds in one General Assembly and again, unchanged, in the next, when it becomes part of the Constitution. 3 amendments proposed by the last General Assembly passed their second vote this term (HB 10, SB 15, SB 11) and are counted as law. 8 proposed amendments passed their first vote (HB 430, HS 1 for HB 320, HB 180, HS 1 for HB 35, SB 264, SS 2 for SB 100, SS 1 for SB 3, SS 1 for SB 2); the next General Assembly decides them.
• 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.

Budget projects

• Delaware's budget and grant-in-aid bills don't say which legislator asked for an item, so there's no budget figure for Delaware legislators.

The November 3 ballot

• All 41 House seats are up, for two-year terms, and 11 of the 21 Senate seats, for four-year terms: the senators elected in 2024 serve until 2028. The members elected take office the day after the election.
• The candidates are those the Department of Elections' list of filed candidates for the 2026 general election showed on Oct. 23, 2026, with the party that nominated each; two withdrawn candidates aren't shown. The list also gives each candidate's contact details; only names, parties, districts and filing dates were read from it.
• The address lookup and the district map use the districts the General Assembly drew in 2021, the ones the members elected in 2022 and 2024 represent.

Recent key votes

Each legislator's page lists their five most recent key votes, and its voting record opens with their key votes (the newest 300) until the whole record loads. A key vote is a contested or party-line roll call (both as defined above) that gave the chamber's last word on a whole bill, budgets included: its passage, agreeing to the other chamber's changes, adopting a conference committee's report or accepting the Governor's amendments, or a vote to override a veto. We read that from the motion as the record names it. Amendments, procedural motions and the adoption of resolutions aren't key votes, and neither is a motion we haven't listed. This term, 120 of the Delaware House's 512 roll calls and 79 of the Delaware Senate's 776 are key votes.

Next to each key vote is the bill's plain-language explanation where one has been checked against the official text (below); where there isn't one yet, the page says so rather than describe the bill another way.

Bill explanations

Delaware vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the bill's title as legis.delaware.gov lists it, and the page links to the bill's page there, where its text, history and votes 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 Delaware legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every Delaware 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.csv: How every Delaware legislator voted on every floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every Delaware bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: Delaware House: current members match the chamber's own list — 41 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Delaware Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 21 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Delaware: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 866 sponsor credits on 866 bills
• PASS: Delaware: every bill's primary sponsor tied to one legislator; every bill that passed both chambers law, vetoed, awaiting action or a constitutional amendment agreed to — all of them
• PASS: Delaware: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Delaware: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 62 seats
• PASS: Delaware: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Delaware: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Delaware: every vote page's bill has its title — 1288 votes
• PASS: Delaware: every current legislator has an official portrait — 65 portraits
• PASS: Delaware: the current term hasn't ended — through 2026-11-03
• PASS: Delaware: the district map has every seat, and only those — 41 House districts, 21 Senate districts
• PASS: Delaware: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Delaware: every roll call's record adds up to its counts, agrees with its official document and names every member serving that day once, each tied by the name the chamber prints to one member holding a seat — 1,288 roll calls
• PASS: Delaware: every roll call the chamber's posted Journal covers is the Journal's roll call, with the same counts and names — 619 agree; 669 without a posted Journal
• PASS: Delaware: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 52 races