How the Idaho scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the House and Senate Journals, the official record of each chamber's proceedings, which the Legislature publishes for each session as one file per chamber: the question, the day, and each list of members by how they voted, with its count. Idaho's representatives and senators all serve two-year terms, so this term is the 68th Legislature, December 1, 2024 to November 30, 2026: 2,163 floor roll calls (1,256 in the House, 907 in the Senate), Jan. 6, 2025 to April 2, 2026. The Legislature's list of sessions holds no extraordinary session in the term.
  • 2025 Session: 596 House and 462 Senate roll calls, Jan. 6, 2025 to April 4, 2025.
  • 2026 Session: 660 House and 445 Senate roll calls, Jan. 12, 2026 to April 2, 2026.
• Each Journal list must hold as many names as its count, and the lists must add up to the closing total; a roll call every member voted aye on prints only its AYES list. Each roll call's result is the Journal's own sentence after the lists (“Whereupon the Speaker declared that H 3 passed the House”).
• Every bill's page on legislature.idaho.gov prints each of its final roll calls with the names on every side, and each suspension of the rules with its count. Each Journal roll call on a measure's passage, adoption or a veto override must match its page's roll call that day name for name (1,708 roll calls), and each suspension its count (331); and every roll call a measure's page prints, in either chamber, must be one of the Journals' roll calls. The other 124 roll calls, nearly all suspensions of the rules and motions the pages don't record, come from the Journals alone.
• Most roll calls (1,595) are a bill's final passage on third reading; 439 suspend the rules so a measure can be read and passed the same day (which takes two-thirds). A bill the other chamber amended comes back for passage as amended (47). One roll call tried to override a veto: the Senate's on S 1023 (April 3, 2025), which failed.
• One Senate roll call tied: H 760, 17 to 17, on March 24, 2026. Lieutenant Governor Scott Bedke, who presides over the Senate as its President and votes only to break a tie, voted no (Senate Journal); the vote page says so, and the tally here counts senators only.
• Committee votes aren't included, and neither are votes the chambers take without a roll call (voice votes), which don't record how each member voted. The Senate confirmed the Governor's appointees by voice vote.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 462 in the House and 380 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 Journals print members by surname; where two members of a chamber share one, with the district (“Crane(12)”, “Tanner(14)”); and the Speaker as “Mr. Speaker”. Each name must be the one member holding a seat in that chamber that day, and each roll call must name every member serving that day exactly once. Every name on every roll call used met these checks.
• Acting members. Idaho law (Idaho Code 67-412) lets a legislator who can't attend designate a substitute, who takes the oath and votes in the legislator's place. The Journals print the vote under both names (the House “Green(Schubin)”, the Senate “Woller (Rabe)”) and count it in the official tally. Here the tallies stay as the Journals print them; the legislator on leave is recorded as absent and excused on that roll call, so it counts among the roll calls they didn't vote on, and the vote page names the acting member and their vote. Each acting member must be one a designation letter the Journal prints names for that district, on a day the letter covers. This term 43 acting members cast 3,214 votes (2,136 in the House, 1,078 in the Senate) in the seats of 31 legislators, on 1,864 roll calls; each of those legislators' pages says how many. The letters print the acting members' home addresses; only their names are kept.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on Idaho legislators. Where it differs from the official record, we follow the House Journal, which prints the resignation letters and the Governor's certificates of appointment (6 dates). Four House seats changed hands between the sessions: Todd Achilles (District 16, Seat B) resigned effective June 29, 2025, and Annie Henderson Haws was appointed from July 22; Kevin Andrus (District 35, Seat A) resigned effective September 12, 2025, and Mike Veile was appointed from September 24; Lance Clow (District 25, Seat A) resigned effective November 30, 2025, and Don Hall was appointed from December 2; Wendy Horman (District 32, Seat B) resigned effective January 5, 2026, and Erin Bingham was appointed from January 9. No Senate seat changed hands. In each case every roll call names the member serving that day.
• No legislator changed parties while in office.
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and Senate's member lists of 2026-10-22: names, districts, seats and parties.
• Photos are the official portraits on the Legislature's member lists; the four representatives who left during the term show their portraits from the Legislature's 2025 directory.

Votes with the Speaker or President Pro Tempore

• Each chamber is compared with its own elected leader, who votes like any member: Speaker Mike Moyle (District 10), elected Speaker at the organizational session of December 5, 2024 (House Journal), and Senate President Pro Tempore Kelly Anthon (District 27), elected that day for the 68th Legislature (Senate Journal). Lieutenant Governor Scott Bedke presides over the Senate as its President 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 on 1,252 of 1,256 House roll calls (nay on 68); the President Pro Tempore on 863 of 907 Senate roll calls (nay on 32).
• 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 (249 in the House, 150 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. The House Journal lists them as absent, the Senate Journal as absent and excused, without saying why, so these pages don't say “missed”. A legislator whose seat an acting member voted in counts as absent and excused (above).
• A representative the House excused from voting on a measure because of a conflict of interest (House Rule 80) is counted as abstaining, not as not voting (8 roll calls have one).
• “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 2 in 5 of those votes.
• Idaho legislators break from their party on party-line votes far more often than members of Congress: one in ten breaks on at least 38.9% of them, against 7.4% in Congress, and the median legislator on 9.9%, against 1.7%. So the Idaho pages use color steps four times Congress's, as the Texas pages do: purple at 40% rather than 10%, then 30, 20, 12 and 6%. That keeps purple for those who cross most often: 6 of the 105 current members.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced in the term, from the Legislature's lists of legislation and each bill's page: 988 House bills and 457 Senate bills, appropriation bills and the joint resolutions proposing amendments to the Idaho Constitution included. Other resolutions and memorials aren't laws and aren't counted. Bill numbers run on through the term: the 2025 Session's House bills are H 1 to H 488 and the 2026 Session's H 489 to H 978 (Senate bills S 1001 to S 1220, then S 1221 to S 1454).
• A bill counts for each member its page names in its “by” line, in the chamber where it was introduced. Nearly every Idaho bill is introduced by a committee (1,398 of 1,445) and counts for no one, even where a member brought it to the committee and carried it on the floor; 47 were introduced in members' names, and 0 of those passed.
• Passed both chambers: delivered to the Governor or, for a constitutional amendment, to the Secretary of State for the ballot (445 House bills, 246 Senate bills). It became law when the Governor signed it, with or without line-item vetoes (which strike items from an appropriation; 3 laws had them), or let it become law without a signature: 684 laws in all. 5 were vetoed and stood. The outcomes agree with the Legislature's lists of legislation and of vetoes, bill for bill. The 2026 bill pages say the four vetoes of that year came on April 28, 2026; the Governor's letters returning them are dated April 8, 2026, and these pages use the letters' date. 2 proposed constitutional amendments, HJR 4 and HJR 6 of 2025, are on the November 3, 2026 ballot.
• 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

• Idaho's appropriation bills don't say which legislator asked for an item, so there's no budget figure for Idaho legislators.

The November 3 ballot

• All 105 seats are up: each of the 35 districts elects one senator and two representatives, to Seat A and Seat B, all for two-year terms. The members elected take office on December 1, 2026.
• The candidates are each party's nominee, the candidate with the most votes in the party's May 19 primary, from the Secretary of State's official canvass of the primary (193 nominees: 102 Republicans, 90 Democrats and 1 Libertarian). Every seat has at least one. The Secretary of State's full list of general election candidates is only in a web app our scripts don't read, so independent candidates, who aren't in a primary, and anyone who replaced a nominee after the primary, aren't listed: the Secretary of State's election page has them. Only names, parties, districts and seats were kept.
• The address lookup and the district map use the districts the Commission for Reapportionment drew after the 2020 census, first used in 2022, the ones the members elected in 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, 445 of the Idaho House's 1,256 roll calls and 369 of the Idaho Senate's 907 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

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

Checks

• PASS: Idaho House: current members match the chamber's own list — 70 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Idaho Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 35 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Idaho: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 48 sponsor credits on 47 bills
• PASS: Idaho: every bill delivered to the Governor law or vetoed, as the Legislature's lists of laws and vetoes have it; every constitutional amendment both chambers adopted sent to the voters; members' bills credited to the members their "by" line names — all of them
• PASS: Idaho: every member note on acting members' votes counts them as the roll calls do — 31 members
• PASS: Idaho: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Idaho: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 70 seats
• PASS: Idaho: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Idaho: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Idaho: every vote page's bill has its title — 2163 votes
• PASS: Idaho: every current legislator has an official portrait — 109 portraits
• PASS: Idaho: the current term hasn't ended — through 2026-11-30
• PASS: Idaho: the district map has every seat, and only those — 35 House districts, 35 Senate districts
• PASS: Idaho: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Idaho: every Journal roll call's lists add up to their totals and name every member serving that day once, each tied to the one member holding a seat (an acting member's vote to one the Journal's letters designate that day); every final roll call matches its measure's page member for member, and every tally a measure's page prints is a Journal roll call — 2,163 roll calls: 1,708 matched name for name, 331 by tally, 124 in the Journals only
• PASS: Idaho: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 70 races