How the Iowa scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from its chamber's Journal, the official record of each legislative day, which prints every floor roll call with the question, the members voting yea, nay and not voting by name, and the result. The 91st General Assembly began on January 13, 2025, so we use every floor roll call of its sessions: 1,441 roll calls (825 in the House, 616 in the Senate), Jan. 30, 2025 to Oct. 2, 2026.
  • 2025 Regular Session: 379 House and 301 Senate roll calls, Jan. 30, 2025 to May 14, 2025.
  • 2026 Regular Session: 445 House and 312 Senate roll calls, Jan. 21, 2026 to May 3, 2026.
  • 2026 Extraordinary Session: 1 House and 3 Senate roll calls, Oct. 2, 2026.
• Each chamber's voting system also prints a record of each roll call, with its time and a sequence number; the General Assembly posts the records of votes on bills and amendments on its “Floor Votes on Bills” lists. All 1,413 posted records are checked against the Journals: each one must be a roll call the Journal prints that day (or, past midnight, in the Journal of the day the sitting began: 32 records), on the same measure and the same kind of question, with the same vote from every member. All of them are. Their sequence numbers must also run in the Journals' order, and each gap between two of them must leave room for the roll calls only the Journals print in between. Both hold.
• 28 roll calls appear only in the Journals: the Senate's 23 votes confirming the Governor's appointees, and a few motions. They're used from the Journal's own lists, under the same rules. 7 House sequence numbers have neither a posted record nor a Journal roll call (two at the start of each session, the others single numbers); we can't tell what they were, so they are NOT VERIFIED and nothing is shown for them.
• The Journal names the wrong measure in 3 roll calls, where its own account of what was taken up and the voting system's record both name another; the pages follow those two:
  • House Journal, May 12, 2025, page 1139: printed HF 593, the vote on SF 593.
  • House Journal, May 2, 2026, page 1099: printed HF 2480, the vote on SF 2480.
  • House Journal, May 2, 2026, page 1102: printed HF 639, the vote on SF 639.
• The Senate Journal of March 2, 2026 (page 428) prints one roll call's absent list with its count but no names; they are the 6 members serving that day the other lists don't name (Cherielynn Westrich, Dave Rowley, Jack Whitver, Janice Weiner, Julian Garrett, Matt Blake), and the voting system's record of the roll call names the same members.
• The result each page shows is the Journal's (“The bill, having received a constitutional majority, was declared to have passed the Senate”, “Amendment S–5261 lost”).
• Committee votes aren't included. Neither are voice votes, which don't record how each member voted.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 360 in the House and 227 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 name members by surname, with an initial where two in the chamber share it (“Meyer, A.”, “Johnson, R.”), the Speaker as “Grassley, Spkr.” or “Speaker Grassley”, and the member presiding as, for example, “Wills, Presiding”; the House prints a vacant seat as “Open”. Each name goes to the one legislator holding a seat in that chamber that day with that surname, and each roll call must name every member serving that day exactly once, and the House's “Open” seats must be the seats empty that day. Every name on every roll call matched exactly one legislator.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on Iowa legislators, tied to the General Assembly's own member numbers. Where Open States differs from the official record, we follow the chambers' member lists, which print each former member's dates of service, and the resignation letters and oaths the Journals print (6 dates). In the House, Rep. Martin Graber (District 100) died on January 31, 2025, and Blaine Watkins took the seat on March 24, 2025; Sami Scheetz (District 78) resigned on April 1, 2025, and Angel Ramirez took the seat on May 13, 2025; Mike Sexton (District 7) resigned on September 19, 2025, and Wendy Larson took the seat on January 12, 2026; Jon Dunwell (District 38) resigned on October 5, 2026. In the Senate, Mike Zimmer took District 35 on February 10, 2025, left vacant when Chris Cournoyer became Lieutenant Governor in December 2024; Sen. Rocky De Witt (District 1) died on June 25, 2025, and Catelin Drey took the seat on September 15, 2025; Sen. Claire Celsi (District 16) died on October 6, 2025, and Renee Hardman took the seat on January 12, 2026; Sen. Julian Garrett (District 11), absent the whole 2026 session, died on June 8, 2026.
• No member changed parties during the term: each House record prints every member's party beside their name, and every one is the member's party; news searches found no change in the Senate either.
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and Senate's member lists of 2026-10-21, names and parties.
• Photos are the official portraits on each member's page on legis.iowa.gov, which are 137 pixels wide; they're shown at their own size, never enlarged. The page's notice about the photographs is quoted in the sources table below.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President

• Each chamber elects its presiding officer from its members, who votes like any member: the House elected Pat Grassley (District 57) Speaker and the Senate elected Amy Sinclair (District 12) its President on January 13, 2025, and both held the offices through the term. Iowa's Lieutenant Governor has no role in the Senate.
• 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 825 of 825 House roll calls (nay on 151); the Senate President on 572 of 616 Senate roll calls (nay on 42).
• 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 (323 in the House, 206 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. A legislator who changed parties would be compared, vote by vote, with the party they belonged to that day; no Iowa legislator did this term.
• 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 Journal shows no vote for them. The Journals list every member who didn't vote as “Absent or not voting” (House) or “Absent” (Senate) and don't say why, so these pages don't say “missed” or “excused”.
• A House member who has a personal interest in a question is excused from voting on it at their request (House Rule 76; the Journal lists them as “Rule 76 invoked”). That isn't counted as a vote not cast: it happened 7 times, on 7 roll calls.
• “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.
• Iowa legislators break from their party on party-line votes more often than members of Congress: one in ten breaks on at least 11.3% of them, against 7.4% in Congress, and the median legislator on 2.2%, against 1.7%. So the Iowa pages use the color steps of the other states whose legislators break about as often, twice Congress's: purple at 20% rather than 10%, then 15, 10, 6 and 3%. That keeps purple for those who cross most often: 1 of the 148 current members, in the House.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every House File, Senate File and joint resolution of the 91st General Assembly, from each one's history on legis.iowa.gov: 1,640 House measures and 1,077 Senate measures, appropriations bills included. Resolutions and concurrent resolutions aren't laws and aren't counted; study bills are committees' drafts, counted as the bill a committee introduces from them. Bills withdrawn (353, most of them when a committee took the bill up as its own under a new number) aren't counted either, except a member's bill credited through the committee's bill, below.
• A bill counts for its sponsor, the first member its history names (“By Gustoff, Hermanson, …”). Co-sponsors aren't counted. Iowa's committees bring most bills to the floor as their own (“By COMMITTEE ON JUDICIARY”), under a new number, 1,315 of them this term. A committee's bill that passed counts for the member whose bill it replaced where Iowa's records name that bill both ways: the committee bill's title says it was formerly that one bill (“(Formerly HF 14.)”), and that bill's title points to the committee bill (“(See HF 383.)”). The member's own bill is then shown as passed as the committee's bill, with its outcome, so it isn't counted twice: 94 bills this term. A committee's bill formed from a study bill (a committee's or agency's draft, 241 that passed) or from several bills (35) counts for no one. No bill is matched by the words of its title.
• Passed both chambers: a bill was reported enrolled and sent to the Governor, or a joint resolution passed by both went to the Secretary of State (226 House measures, 153 Senate measures; 370 of them committees' bills). A bill became law when the Governor signed it (370 laws, 5 of them appropriations bills signed with item vetoes). 7 were vetoed; no veto was overridden. Two joint resolutions proposing amendments to the Constitution passed both chambers and went to the Secretary of State, not the Governor: an amendment goes to the voters only after two General Assemblies in a row pass it. SJR 11 (two-thirds votes in both chambers to raise income tax rates or create an income tax) is the second passage of the amendment the 90th General Assembly passed as HJR 2006 in 2024, so it is on the November 3, 2026 ballot; SJR 9 (the right of an accused to confront child and other vulnerable witnesses) passed for the first time and goes to the next General Assembly.
• The bills the histories say were vetoed and item vetoed must be exactly the ones the General Assembly's lists of vetoed and item-vetoed bills name; every bill sent to the Governor must have been signed or vetoed; and the measures that passed must be exactly the ones each session's list of enrolled bills names, signed the same day. All of that holds, except that the 2026 list dates HF 2634's signature April 16, before it was sent to the Governor on May 6; the House Journal (June 10, 2026, page 1167) and its history say May 15, which the page shows.
• 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. 9 members' bills passed under their own numbers this term, and 94 as a committee's bill.

Budget projects

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

The November 3 ballot

• Iowa elects its whole House every two years and half its Senate every two years, for four-year terms: on November 3, 2026, all 100 House seats and the 25 odd-numbered Senate districts are on the ballot.
• The candidates are the ones the Secretary of State's candidate list for the November 3, 2026 general election names, in the version dated Aug. 19, 2026 that the Secretary of State's general-election page linked on October 21, 2026, with each one's party (“No Party” for a candidate nominated by petition). The Secretary of State's site doesn't allow automated reading, so the list was saved once through a browser. It also lists candidates' addresses, phone numbers and email addresses; only names and parties were kept.
• The address lookup and the district map use the districts of the 2021 redistricting plan, first used in 2022, the ones the members of the 91st General Assembly 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, 191 of the Iowa House's 825 roll calls and 166 of the Iowa Senate's 616 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

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

Checks

• PASS: Iowa House: current members match the chamber's own list — 99 members and 1 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Iowa Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 49 members and 1 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Iowa: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 1,643 sponsor credits on 1,643 bills
• PASS: Iowa: every bill's sponsor tied to one legislator; every bill sent to the Governor signed or vetoed; the vetoed and item-vetoed bills the same as the General Assembly's lists — 3,070 bills: 370 laws (5 with item vetoes), 7 vetoed, 1 joint resolutions passed
• PASS: Iowa: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Iowa: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 150 seats
• PASS: Iowa: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Iowa: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• WARN: Iowa: every vote page's bill has its title — 1 without a title, e.g. —
• PASS: Iowa: every current legislator has an official portrait — 155 portraits
• PASS: Iowa: the current term hasn't ended — through 2027-01-10
• PASS: Iowa: the district map has every seat, and only those — 100 House districts, 50 Senate districts
• PASS: Iowa: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Iowa: every Journal roll call adds up to its printed counts and names every member serving that day once, each tied to the one member holding a seat — all 1,441
• PASS: Iowa: every voting-system record the General Assembly posts is a Journal roll call that day on the same measure, member for member — 1,413 of 1,413 records
• WARN: Iowa: the records' sequence numbers run in the Journals' order, each gap holding the Journal-only roll calls in it — 28 Journal-only roll calls fit; numbers with no record or Journal roll call (NOT VERIFIED): House 2025: 2 number(s) between records 0 and 3 (House Journal 2025-01-30, page 163); House 2025: 1 number(s) between records 141 and 143 (House Journal 2025-03-19, page 733); House 2025: 1 number(s) between records 166 and 168 (House Journal 2025-03-24, page 779); House 2026: 2 number(s) between records 0 and 3 (House Journal 2026-01-21, page 136); House 2026: 1 number(s) between records 56 and 58 (House Journal 2026-03-02, page 465)
• PASS: Iowa: every House record's party letter is the member's party — all of them
• PASS: Iowa: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 125 races