How the Hawaii scores work

The vote records

• Each roll call has two records at the Hawaii State Legislature: the step of the measure's status history that records the vote, and the chamber's Journal for that day, which prints the same vote with its count. This term is the 33rd Legislature, whose members' terms began with their election on November 5, 2024: 3,903 floor roll calls (1,813 in the House, 2,090 in the Senate), Feb. 7, 2025 to May 8, 2026. The Legislature met in no special session this term.
  • 2025 Regular Session: 871 House and 1,071 Senate roll calls, Feb. 7, 2025 to May 2, 2025.
  • 2026 Regular Session: 942 House and 1,019 Senate roll calls, Feb. 6, 2026 to May 8, 2026.
• Both chambers record a vote by exception: they name the members who voted no, who voted “aye with reservations” and who were excused, and every other member serving that day voted aye. An aye with reservations is an aye: the Journals count it with the ayes, and so do these pages (1,402 such votes on 691 roll calls). Each vote page names the members who voted that way.
• A roll call is used only if its two records agree: the Journal prints a tally on that measure that day naming the same members on each side, with as many noes and excused as the status record counts, and as many ayes as the members serving that day less those named. Every name must be one member serving in that chamber that day (by surname, with an initial where two share one). All 3,903 roll calls used agree; every tally the Journals print is one of them or is listed below as left out.
• Which Journals: for 2025, the bound House and Senate Journals; for 2026, the Senate's “Advance” copies and, because the House hasn't posted its bound 2026 Journal, the House's daily Mini Journal and Rough Draft Journal, which it calls informational copies, not the certified record. Those are scanned pages whose machine-read text garbles some words, so each 2026 House roll call (942 of them) is checked against either scan, reading a garbled name as the serving member whose name is closest (80 names, such as “Shirnizu” for Shimizu); the counts must agree exactly, and the names on these pages come from the status records, never the scans.
• Left out, because the records disagree in a way neither settles: HB 1161 (Hawaii Senate, April 8, 2025); HB 344 (Hawaii Senate, April 8, 2025); HB 504 (Hawaii Senate, April 8, 2025). Late on April 8, 2025 the Senate voted again on three bills it had passed that day (H.B. 1161 after reconsidering its 25-0 vote). The Senate Journal prints the new votes with Stanley Chang excused; the bills' status records count Stanley Chang's vote as aye. No third record settles which is right.
• A vote counts as a roll call where the Journal prints its tally. The House decides many questions by voice and records only who was excused and anyone who asked to be recorded voting no: 1,961 votes passing bills on Second Reading and 1,468 others (committee reports adopted with the bill sent to another committee, resolutions adopted, recommittals, floor amendments). So does the Senate on its resolutions and some floor amendments (110). The measures' status pages list those votes with the same kind of names, but they aren't roll calls and aren't counted here. Committee votes aren't included either.
• The Senate's consent to 495 of the Governor's and the Chief Justice's appointments came on 317 roll calls; 108 of them consented to several appointments at once and count once, listing every nominee. The House's 3 roll calls on sustaining a ruling of the Chair, which a fifth of its members asked for, appear only in the Journal, which names every member; both 2026 scans must name the same members. 2 floor amendments were decided by roll call.
• A bill's passage on Third Reading and on Final Reading (the vote on a conference draft, or on agreeing to the other chamber's amendments) are a legislator's key votes. Confirmations, amendments and rulings 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 ayes and noes: 209 in the House and 136 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

• Each name in a vote's records is tied to the one member of that name serving in that chamber that day (“Lee, C.” is Senator Chris Lee), and each member serving that day who isn't named voted aye. Every name on every roll call used matched exactly one legislator.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on Hawaii legislators. Where it differs from the official record, we follow the Governor's appointment letters, the Journals and the Office of Elections' vacancy proclamations (6 dates). In the House, Gene Ward (District 18) resigned effective March 31, 2025, and died on April 4; the Governor appointed Joe Gedeon on May 28, 2025. Rachele Lamosao (District 36) left the House on December 3, 2025, for the Senate seat Henry Aquino (District 19) left on November 30, 2025, and Daisy Hartsfield was appointed to that House seat on January 12, 2026. Daniel Holt (District 28) resigned on February 13, 2026, and Cov Ratcliffe was appointed on April 13, 2026. In the Senate, Michelle Kidani (District 18) resigned before July 1, 2026, the day the vacancy was proclaimed (the resignation's own date isn't published), and Danielle Bass was appointed on August 9, 2026, after the session. Seats a resignation left empty are counted as vacant until the appointee's first day.
• Elle Cochran (House District 14) left the Democratic Party and joined the Republican minority on March 16, 2026, by the memorandum to the Speaker the House Journal prints that day. Each vote is compared with the party the member belonged to that day, in party tallies and in the party-line score.
• Each build checks our current members against the Legislature's lists of its members for the 2026 session, of Oct. 22, 2026: names, districts and parties. The lists still show Daniel Holt and Michelle Kidani and don't yet show Danielle Bass; the check takes those changes from the sources above.
• Photos are the official portraits on the Legislature's member lists; Gene Ward's and Henry Aquino's are the files in the same folder.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President

• Each chamber is measured against the leader it elects from its members, who votes like any member: Speaker Nadine Nakamura (District 15), whom the House elected on January 15, 2025, and Senate President Ron Kouchi (District 8), President since 2015, whom the Senate re-elected that day. The Speaker voted on 1,812 of 1,813 House roll calls (no on 1); the Senate President on 2,074 of 2,090 Senate roll calls (no on 1).
• 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 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 (152 in the House, 278 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.
• Democrats hold most of the seats (the House's Republicans numbered 9, then 10 after Elle Cochran joined them; the Senate's, 3), so nearly every party-line vote is one where most of the small Republican minority voted no. A Democrat's party-line score says how often they voted with their party on those votes; divisions among Democrats show more in the leader score and in each legislator's contested votes.
• 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 records show them excused. The records don't say why, so these pages don't say “missed”. Members present vote aye unless they're recorded voting no or aye with reservations, so “excused” is the only way the records show a member not voting.
• “In office” means the member held the seat that day: each roll call counts every member serving.

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.
• Hawaii legislators cross party lines on party-line votes about twice as often as members of Congress among those who do it most: one in ten does so on at least 14.0% of them, against 7.4% in Congress; the median legislator does on 2.0%, against 1.7%. So the Hawaii pages use color steps twice Congress's: purple at 20% rather than 10%, then 15, 10, 6 and 3%. That keeps purple for those who cross most often: 4 of the 75 current members scored. With so few Republicans, a Republican seat in purple is one that sided with the Democrats on many of the votes where most of its party voted the other way.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill of the term, from each measure's status page: 2,625 House bills and 3,006 Senate bills, the bills proposing amendments to the State Constitution included. A bill not finished in 2025 carried over to 2026 under the same number. Resolutions aren't laws and aren't counted.
• A bill counts for the member it lists first among its introducers, a member of the chamber where it was introduced; co-introducers aren't counted. 897 bills were introduced “by request of another party” (the Governor's and state agencies' bills, which a presiding officer or chair introduces without endorsing them) and count for no one.
• Passed both chambers: the bill was sent to the Governor, or got an Act number or a veto (305 House bills, 285 Senate bills). It became law with an Act number, signed or allowed to become law without the Governor's signature (579 laws, exactly the Acts each year numbered from 1, 2 of them appropriation bills the Governor signed after vetoing some of their items). 9 were vetoed; the Legislature overrode none. 2 proposed constitutional amendments (SB 121 of 2025 and SB 3219 of 2026) went to the voters on November 3, 2026, as the Office of Elections lists them; such a bill isn't sent to the Governor.
• 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

• These pages don't credit budget items to Hawaii legislators.

The November 3 ballot

• All 51 House seats are elected this year, for two-year terms, and 13 of the 25 Senate seats, for four-year terms, along with Senate Districts 18 and 19 for the rest of terms that end in 2028. A candidate left without an opponent after the August 8 primary is declared elected and doesn't appear on the November ballot: 20 House and 9 Senate seats were settled that way.
• The candidates are those the Office of Elections' 2026 Candidate Report listed on Oct. 22, 2026 as on the general election ballot or elected after the primary, with the party each filed with (a “nonpartisan” candidate is shown as having no party affiliation). Names are as they appear on the ballot. The report also prints candidates' addresses, phone numbers and e-mail; only the contest, party, ballot name and status were kept.
• The address lookup and the district map use the districts the Reapportionment Commission drew after the 2020 census, 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, 214 of the Hawaii House's 1,813 roll calls and 281 of the Hawaii Senate's 2,090 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

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

Checks

• PASS: Hawaii House: current members match the chamber's own list — 51 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Hawaii Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 25 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Hawaii: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 4,734 sponsor credits on 4,734 bills
• PASS: Hawaii: every bill's first introducer tied to one legislator (or introduced by request); every bill sent to the Governor law or vetoed, the laws exactly each year's Acts; the amendments passed are the Office of Elections' ballot list — all of them
• PASS: Hawaii: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Hawaii: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 76 seats
• PASS: Hawaii: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Hawaii: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Hawaii: every vote page's bill has its title — 3903 votes
• WARN: Hawaii: every current legislator has an official portrait — 1 without (initials shown): Danielle Bass (Senate 18)
• PASS: Hawaii: the current term hasn't ended — through 2026-11-03
• PASS: Hawaii: the district map has every seat, and only those — 51 House districts, 25 Senate districts
• PASS: Hawaii: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Hawaii: every roll call in a measure's status history matches the chamber's Journal tally that day member for member, each name tied to the one member serving; every Journal tally is a roll call kept or listed as left out — 3,903 roll calls; 3 left out and listed
• PASS: Hawaii: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 66 races