How the Illinois scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the General Assembly's own records on ilga.gov. Each floor roll call is published as a record of its own, linked from the bill's Vote History page, which names every member serving that day and how they voted; the House Journal, the House's official record of each legislative day, reprints every House roll call of the day in full at its end. We use every House and Senate floor roll call of the 104th General Assembly, 2,670 roll calls (1,437 in the House, 1,233 in the Senate), Jan. 8, 2025 to May 31, 2026. The spring 2026 session ended in May; the fall veto session hadn't met when these records were read.
• A roll call is used only if every name on it ties to one legislator serving in that chamber that day, its marks add up to the counts it prints, and it lists every member serving that day exactly once. Where both the record and the House Journal print a roll call (497 House roll calls), they must agree member for member, and they did. Where Open States, which reads the same records, has one, its counts and each member's vote must agree too.
• The House Journals are posted through May 25, 2026. 777 House roll calls are taken from the Journal alone (most bills' Vote History pages weren't read: the Journal prints the same roll call); 164 House roll calls from after the last Journal posted come from their records alone. The Senate Journal prints the yeas, nays and present by name but not who was absent, so every Senate roll call comes from its record.
• Each chamber numbers its roll calls within each legislative day, and a legislative day can run past midnight. A roll call is matched by its legislative day and number, and dated the day it was taken: the House Journal of the 61st legislative day, October 30, 2025, for example, records House Bill 1312 as passed “on October 31, 2025”. 16 roll calls here were taken after midnight.
• As a check from a second source, each build compares every roll call on a bill with the tally the bill's history prints for that chamber and day (“Third Reading - Short Debate - Passed 113-000-000”, yeas, nays and present); the result is under Checks.
• We leave out roll calls that aren't a vote on a question: the quorum calls that open each day (96 in the House) and the elections of the Speaker and the Senate President on January 8, 2025, where members chose between candidates.
• The Senate's votes to confirm the Governor's appointments are included (149). The Senate confirms many appointments on one motion in writing, one roll call printed once for each appointment message (6 such roll calls); each counts once. 33 House roll calls are on no bill (a motion to suspend the posting requirements for several bills, or to expunge remarks from the record); their pages describe the motion in the Journal's words.
• Committee votes aren't included. Neither are voice votes, which don't record how each member voted.
• The House's records print whether each question carried (“PASSED”, “CONCURRED”, “LOST”); the Senate's don't, so a Senate roll call's result is the one its bill's history prints with the same day and tally. The vote pages show it. 4 House and 0 Senate roll calls failed.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 550 in the House and 251 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 print each member by surname, with a first name or initial where two share one (“Davis,Jed”, “Turner, D.”), and the presiding officer as “Mr. Speaker” or “Mr. President”. Each name goes to the one legislator who held a seat in that chamber that day and has that surname (and that first name or initial); a name that fit no one, or more than one, would stop the roll call. Every name on every roll call matched, and each printed name went to the same legislator all term.
• Names and terms come from Open States. Where its dates differ from the General Assembly's own records, we follow those: Representative Terra Costa Howard's resignation, effective October 2, 2025, and Margaret DeLaRosa's appointment and oath on October 12, 2025 (House Journal, October 14, 2025); Representative Marty Moylan's resignation, effective December 16, 2025 (House Journal, January 14, 2026). Open States has no House seat for Paul Jacobs this term: the House Journal of January 8, 2025 prints his election in the 118th District, and he served until he took the Senate's 59th District seat in June 2026. Representative Harry Benton resigned on July 3, 2026, as news reports of his resignation give it; the House hasn't met since to print it. Senator Dale Fowler resigned after the spring session ended on May 31, 2026, as his office announced; the exact days he left and Paul Jacobs took his seat aren't yet in a Journal, so these pages use Open States' dates (June 3 and June 17). No roll call is affected by the summer 2026 changes: neither chamber voted between May 31 and the end of these records.
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and the Senate's own member lists (ftp.ilga.gov), names and parties.
• Photos are the official portraits from ilga.gov. A member without one shows initials.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President

• Illinois's presiding officers vote like any member: the Speaker of the House, Emanuel “Chris” Welch (District 7), Speaker since January 2021 and re-elected on January 8, 2025, 78 votes to 35, and the President of the Senate, Don Harmon (District 39), President since 2020 and re-elected on January 8, 2025, with 40 of 58 votes. Each held the office for every roll call here.
• 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 1,424 of 1,437 House roll calls (nay on 2); the Senate President on 1,199 of 1,233 Senate roll calls (nay on 0).
• Both leaders are Democrats, the majority party in both chambers.
• 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 (527 in the House, 210 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 records mark a member who didn't vote “E” (an excused absence), “NV” (not voting) or, rarely, “A” (absent).
• A member can also vote “present” (“P”): in the chamber, voting neither yea nor nay. These pages count it as abstaining: a vote cast, on neither side, so it isn't a missed vote and isn't compared with the leader or the party. In Illinois a bill needs the yeas of a majority of the members elected to pass (Constitution, Article IV, Section 8), so on passage a present vote has the same effect as a nay; the pages still show it apart.
• “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 5 of those votes.
• Illinois legislators break from their party on party-line votes more often than members of Congress (one in ten breaks on at least 12.3% of them, against 7.4% in Congress), so the Illinois pages use the same color steps as Florida's, Georgia's, Pennsylvania's and South Carolina's, twice Congress's: purple at 20% rather than 10%, then 15, 10, 6 and 3%. That keeps purple for the truly moderate: 11 of the 174 current members with a score. Most members almost never break: the typical member on 0.5% of party-line votes (0.4% in the House, 0.5% in the Senate).
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every House and Senate bill introduced in the 104th General Assembly: 5,825 House bills and 4,213 Senate bills, the budget bills included. Resolutions aren't counted, including the joint resolutions proposing constitutional amendments, which go to the voters, not the Governor.
• A bill counts for its chief sponsor in the chamber where it was filed: the member who filed it, or the one its history last names after “Chief Sponsor Changed to”. Co-sponsors, and the chief sponsor in the second chamber, aren't counted. The bill status files the General Assembly publishes for bulk use (ftp.ilga.gov) name each sponsor; for bills that never reached the floor, the chief sponsor is Open States' reading of the same files.
• Passed both chambers: the bill's history says “Passed Both Houses” (476 House bills, 380 Senate bills). It became law when it got a Public Act number (the Governor signed it, even with some spending items vetoed or reduced, as he signed both budgets; it took effect without his signature; both chambers accepted the changes of his amendatory veto; or both overrode his veto); it didn't if his veto stood (2). Each build checks the Public Acts against the General Assembly's own list of the 104th's Public Acts, act for act.
• Illinois doesn't mark local bills apart, so every bill counts the same way. The ranked number is bills that passed both chambers.
• 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

• Illinois's budget acts don't name the legislator who asked for an item, so there's no budget figure for Illinois legislators.

The November 3 ballot

• All 118 House seats are on the ballot, and 39 of the 59 Senate seats. Illinois senators serve terms of two or four years in a cycle set at each redistricting; the 20 elected on November 5, 2024 to four-year terms (Districts 1, 4, 7 and every third district to 58), as the State Board of Elections' list in the Senate Journal of January 8, 2025 shows, aren't up this year.
• The candidates are the State Board of Elections' candidate data for the general election, read Oct. 18, 2026: everyone it lists as active for State Representative or State Senator, the parties' nominees from the March 17 primary (or chosen since to fill a vacancy on the ballot) and the independent and new-party candidates who filed. Candidates who withdrew or were removed from the ballot aren't listed. A race with a single candidate is marked unopposed. The Board's site closes itself to automated readers, so its file was saved by hand through a browser.

Bill explanations

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

Checks

• PASS: Illinois House: current members match the chamber's own list — 118 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Illinois Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 59 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Illinois: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 9,796 sponsor credits on 9,796 bills
• PASS: Illinois: every bill's chief sponsor matched to one legislator, every Public Act on the list one bill's — all of them
• PASS: Illinois: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Illinois: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 177 seats
• PASS: Illinois: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Illinois: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Illinois: every vote page's bill has its title — 2670 votes
• PASS: Illinois: every current legislator has an official portrait — 183 portraits
• PASS: Illinois: the district map has every seat, and only those — 118 House districts, 59 Senate districts
• PASS: Illinois: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Illinois: every roll call's names tie to one member each, add up to its printed counts, name every member serving once and agree with Open States' reading — all of them
• PASS: Illinois: every floor roll call's record the bills' Vote History pages link is saved — all of them
• PASS: Illinois: roll calls' yeas, nays and present agree with the tallies the bills' histories print — 2,975 of 2,983 agree; the roll call is followed for 2025-04-10-house-007-hb1237, 2025-04-10-house-016-hb1056, 2025-05-06-house-002 (SB 405), 2025-05-28-house-022 (SB 2319), 2025-05-29-house-017 (SB 2510), 2025-05-31-house-073-hb3374
• WARN: Illinois: every floor vote the bills' histories print has its roll call here — 28 not found: SB 405 House 2025-05-06 071-000-000: Motion to Suspend Rule 21 - Prevailed 071-000-000; HB 111 House 2026-06-01 075-038-001: Motion Prevailed 075-038-001; HB 1305 House 2025-04-09 070-039-000: Motion Prevailed 070-039-000; HB 1056 House 2025-04-10 086-030-000: Third Reading - Short Debate - Passed 086-030-000
• PASS: Illinois: the House Journals reprint every House roll call used on the days they cover, member for member the same — 497 in both, 777 in the Journal only; Journals through 2026-05-25
• PASS: Illinois: the Senate Journals name the same yeas, nays and present for every Senate roll call they print — 809 agree
• PASS: Illinois: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 157 races