How the Georgia scores work

The vote records

Every roll call comes from the House and Senate Journals, the General Assembly's official record of each day on the floor, which print every member's vote by name. They're PDFs on legis.ga.gov, one for each session, posted after it ends. We use the House Journals for the 2025 and 2026 regular sessions and the 2026 special session, and the Senate Journal for the 2025 session: 1,265 roll calls (816 in the House, 449 in the Senate), Jan. 13, 2025 to June 23, 2026.
The Senate hasn't published its 2026 Journals yet, so the Senate's numbers cover the 2025 session only, and senators elected since then have no roll calls here yet. Its 2026 votes will be added when the Journals are posted.
A roll call is used only if its yea and nay marks add up to the count the Journal prints for it. All of them did.
Committee votes aren't included. Neither are voice votes, which don't record how each member voted, or the House's elections of its officers.
The House often passes several local bills on one roll call. Those votes are listed under the first bill, with the number of others (“HB 39 + 2”).
Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 162 in the House and 170 in the Senate. Most of the rest were unanimous or nearly so. Each contested vote has its own page, listed under Contested votes.

Who cast each vote

A Journal lists each member by surname, with an initial or two where members share one (“Smith, V”, “Ridley, Jas”). Each name goes to the one legislator in that chamber with that surname on the day of the vote, the initials choosing among members who share it. Every name on every roll call matched exactly one legislator; a roll call with a name that didn't would be left out and reported here.
Names and terms come from Open States' data on Georgia legislators. Where it differs from the General Assembly's own records, we follow those: Representative Sylvia Wayfer Baker's surname as the Journal and the Secretary of State print it, and the dates members left office, from the Governor's letters in the House Journal and his executive orders calling special elections, or news reports from the day where those don't give the date. Senator Freddie Powell Sims, whom Open States lists as having left, is serving out her term.
The chambers' own member lists aren't open to automated readers, so each build checks our current members against the Secretary of State's certified results instead: the November 2024 general election and every special election and runoff for a legislative seat since.
The member presiding over the chamber, marked P in the House Journal and PRS in the Senate's, isn't counted as missing that vote. Speaker Jon Burns presides over the House, and the Journals show him not voting on every House roll call but one, so he isn't scored.
Photos are the official portraits from legis.ga.gov. A member without one shows initials.

Votes with the Majority Leader

Georgia's presiding officers don't cast recorded votes: the Speaker, as above, and the Lieutenant Governor, who presides over the Senate and isn't a senator. So members are compared with their chamber's Majority Leader, the majority party's floor leader, who votes like any member: Chuck Efstration (District 104) in the House, and Steve Gooch (District 51), who led the Senate majority through the 2025 session and so for every Senate vote here.
Jason Anavitarte (District 31) succeeded Gooch as Senate Majority Leader on June 17, 2025, after the session ended. When the Senate publishes its 2026 Journals, its 2026 votes will be compared with him.
The score is the share of roll calls on which the member voted the same way, yea or nay, as their chamber's Majority Leader. A roll call counts only when both of them voted yea or nay. Efstration voted on 813 of 816 House roll calls; Gooch on 441 of 449 Senate roll calls.
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 (117 in the House, 127 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: 1 votes with their party most often. Members with the same score share a rank.
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, where the Journal shows no yea or nay for them: excused absences (E, and in the Senate C, excused to sit on a conference committee) and other non-votes alike.
Members can ask to have a vote recorded after the roll call closes. The Journal prints those requests, and they don't change the result. These numbers count only what the roll call shows, so a member who often records votes afterward shows more missed votes here than their requests would suggest.
“In office” means the Journal's 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 until they have more.
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.
Georgia legislators break from their party on party-line votes more often than members of Congress (one in ten breaks on at least 12.4% of them, against 7.4% in Congress), about as often as Florida's House members, so the Georgia pages use Florida's color steps, 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 yet, including senators elected since the 2025 session.

The November 3 ballot

Every House and Senate seat is on the ballot. Each party's nominee comes from the Secretary of State's certified results for the May 19 primary and, where no one won a majority, the June 16 runoff.
Georgia prints a race even when only one candidate is running; the list shows that candidate as unopposed.
Independent and third-party candidates, who qualify by petition rather than in a primary, aren't in those results and so aren't listed. Write-in candidates aren't named.
A candidate who serves in the General Assembly now links to their voting record.

Checks

PASS: Georgia House: current members match the chamber's own list — 180 members and 0 vacant seats agree
PASS: Georgia Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 56 members and 0 vacant seats agree
PASS: Georgia: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 236 seats
PASS: Georgia: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
PASS: Georgia: every contested vote's bill has its title — 332 votes
PASS: Georgia: every current legislator has an official portrait — 247 portraits
PASS: Georgia: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
PASS: Georgia: every Journal roll call matches its printed count and every name one legislator — all of them
WARN: Georgia: the Journals cover both chambers' sessions — the Senate hasn't posted its 2026 Journals (legis.ga.gov, Senate Journals); its numbers cover 2025, as the pages say. Add them to ga_journals.JOURNALS when posted
PASS: Georgia: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 236 races