How the Kansas scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the chamber's vote record as kslegislature.gov publishes it: the question, the day, the tally and every member's vote, each name linked to the member by the Legislature's own member ID. Kansas's representatives serve two-year terms, so this term is the Legislature that took office on January 13, 2025: 1,495 floor roll calls (749 in the House, 746 in the Senate), Jan. 22, 2025 to April 11, 2026. The Legislature held no special session in the term.
  • 2025 Session: 352 House and 340 Senate roll calls, Jan. 22, 2025 to April 11, 2025.
  • 2026 Session: 397 House and 406 Senate roll calls, Jan. 15, 2026 to April 11, 2026.
• Each record's list of members and its paragraphs of names must agree and add up to its tally. Each roll call on a bill or resolution is checked against the measure's history in the Legislature's KLISS data service, which records every roll call with its yeas and nays: the same chamber, the same legislative day (or the day the record prints, for a vote taken after midnight), the same yeas and nays, the same kind of action, and the same result. Every history step with a tally (1,435) is one of the roll calls here. Where a measure needed a set number of votes, the result must agree with it: a majority of the members elected (63 in the House, 21 in the Senate) to pass a bill, two-thirds (84 and 27) to override a veto or to propose a constitutional amendment.
• Where two or more roll calls a chamber took that day have the same tally (the House's 13 votes on the Governor's line-item vetoes of April 10, 2026), each is paired with its history step by order: each chamber numbers its roll calls in the order taken (18 roll calls).
• Where the record and the history name the motion differently, the history step, which the Journal confirms, is followed: 33 Senate records call a vote “Final Action” where the history says emergency final action or the consent calendar; the Senate's record of SB 29 on March 20, 2025 says “Adopt CCR”, where the history and the Senate Journal say the Senate concurred in the House's amendments; and two Senate records of April 10, 2026 print “HB 2315” for the line-item vetoes of HB 2513, as the Legislature's votes list and HB 2513's history give them.
• 3 roll calls the bills' histories record have no record in the Legislature's votes list, and come from the Senate Journal, which prints every roll call with each senator's vote: SB 157's final action and an amendment to SB 76 (February 19, 2025) and the Senate's final action on Substitute for SB 315, the budget (March 4, 2026). Each name the Journal prints is tied to the one senator serving that day it can be, and the counts must agree with the history. One House roll call the history doesn't record (Substitute for SB 356, March 18, 2026) was checked against the House Journal by hand.
• The Senate's 59 votes confirming the Governor's appointees are included, each titled with the appointee and the position as the Senate's list of appointments gives them. Their records link no names, so each printed name is tied to the one senator serving that day with that name; “J. Claeys” is printed for both J.R. and Joseph Claeys, who voted the same way on all 23 confirmations they shared. Unlike the other roll calls, the confirmations aren't checked against a second record.
• Committee votes aren't included, and neither are votes the chambers take without a roll call (voice votes and divisions), 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: 379 in the House and 278 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 on a record links to the member's page on kslegislature.gov by the Legislature's member ID (“rep_alcala_john_1”), and each must be a member holding a seat in that chamber that day, printed with their own name; each roll call must name every member serving that day exactly once. Every name on every roll call used met these checks.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on Kansas legislators. Where it differs from the official record, we follow the Legislature's member pages and the Journals, which print the day the Governor appointed each new member (9 dates), and news reports for the days members left. In the House, Scott Hill (District 70) moved to the Senate seat J.R. Claeys resigned on June 2, 2025, taking it on June 26; Greg Wilson was appointed to his House seat on July 30. Patrick Penn (District 85), Michael Thompson (District 33) and Carrie Barth (District 5) resigned between the sessions; no record gives the day, so their pages say they left before their successors' appointments (Steve Brunk, June 24, 2025; Carolyn Caiharr, September 5, 2025; Courtney Sappington, October 13, 2025). Mary Ware resigned from the Senate on November 13, 2025; Silas Miller took her seat on December 22, 2025, and Abi Boatman was appointed to his House seat (District 86) on January 12, 2026. Representative John Resman (District 121) died on March 2, 2026, during the 2026 Session; Mike Storm was appointed on March 16. In each case every roll call names the member serving that day.
• No legislator changed parties during the term: every record lists each member with the same party throughout.
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and Senate's member lists of 2026-10-22: names, districts and parties.
• Photos are the official portraits the Legislature posts for each member, under the member's own identifier, so a former member's portrait is still their own. The Legislature's redesigned site stopped serving them in October 2026; where it no longer does, the photo is the Internet Archive's copy of that same file from earlier that month, or from the Legislature's previous site, as the ledger of portrait sources records. No copy was found of Mike Argabright's, Mary Ware's, Chase Blasi's or Joseph Claeys's; their pages show their initials.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President

• Each chamber elects its own presiding officer, who votes like any member: Speaker Dan Hawkins (District 100), elected Speaker by unanimous ballot on January 13, 2025, and Speaker since 2023, and Senate President Ty Masterson (District 16), elected by acclamation the same day, and President since 2021. Kansas'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 748 of 749 House roll calls (nay on 53); the Senate President on 743 of 746 Senate roll calls (nay on 39).
• 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 (317 in the House, 217 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 list members who didn't vote as absent or not voting and don't say why, so these pages don't say “missed” or “excused”. A member recorded “present and passing” declined to vote yea or nay; that counts as an abstention, not as not voting (32 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 1 in 5 of those votes.
• Kansas legislators break from their party on party-line votes more often than members of Congress: one in ten breaks on at least 12.2% of them, against 7.4% in Congress, and the median legislator on 4.3%, against 1.7%. So the Kansas 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: 7 of the 165 current members.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced in the term, from the Legislature's KLISS bill list: 818 House bills and 551 Senate bills, appropriation bills and the concurrent resolutions proposing amendments to the Kansas Constitution included. Other resolutions aren't laws and aren't counted. A bill keeps its number for the whole term: HB 2007 introduced in 2025 is still HB 2007 in 2026.
• A bill counts for each member its record names as an original sponsor, in the chamber where it was introduced. Most Kansas bills are introduced by a committee (1,104 of 1,369) and count for no one. 1 sponsor name tied to no member serving the day the bill was introduced and isn't credited.
• Passed both chambers: enrolled and presented to the Governor, or, for a constitutional amendment, to the Secretary of State for the ballot (204 House bills, 103 Senate bills). It became law when the Governor approved it (with or without line-item vetoes) or let it become law without her signature, or when both chambers overrode her veto (286 laws, 34 of them over her veto). 19 were vetoed and stood. 2 proposed constitutional amendments went to the voters.
• 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

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

The November 3 ballot

• All 125 House seats are up, for two-year terms. The Senate was elected in 2024 for four-year terms, so no Senate seat is up for a full term; Senate Districts 24 and 25, filled by appointment in 2025, are on the ballot for the last two years of the term, as the Secretary of State's primary results list them. The members elected take office on January 11, 2027.
• The candidates are the Republican and Democratic nominees, each the candidate with the most votes in their party's August 4 primary, from the Secretary of State's 2026 Primary Election Official Vote Totals (212 nominees). The Secretary of State's list of general election candidates couldn't be read (its site turned our requests away), so candidates of other parties and independents, who aren't in a primary, and anyone who replaced a nominee after the primary, aren't listed: the Secretary of State's candidate list has them. A write-in candidate's primary win needs enough votes and the candidate's acceptance, which the totals don't show, so 1 write-in primary winner isn't listed. Only names, parties and districts were kept.
• The address lookup and the district map use the districts the Legislature drew in 2022, the ones the House elected in 2022 and 2024 and the Senate 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, 318 of the Kansas House's 749 roll calls and 245 of the Kansas Senate's 746 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

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

Checks

• PASS: Kansas House: current members match the chamber's own list — 125 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Kansas Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 40 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Kansas: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 1,614 sponsor credits on 265 bills
• PASS: Kansas: every bill that passed both chambers law, vetoed or sent to the voters; members' bills credited to the members their original sponsors name — all of them
• PASS: Kansas: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Kansas: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 165 seats
• PASS: Kansas: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Kansas: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Kansas: every vote page's bill has its title — 1495 votes
• WARN: Kansas: every current legislator has an official portrait — 3 without (initials shown): Mike Argabright (Senate 17), Chase Blasi (Senate 26), Joseph Claeys (Senate 27)
• PASS: Kansas: the current term hasn't ended — through 2027-01-10
• PASS: Kansas: the district map has every seat, and only those — 125 House districts, 40 Senate districts
• PASS: Kansas: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Kansas: every roll call's list and paragraphs agree and add up to its tally; it names every member serving that day once, each tied by the Legislature's member ID to the member holding a seat; it matches a step of the measure's history with the same yeas and nays (or the Journal); every history tally is a roll call; every outcome agrees with the vote the Constitution requires — 1,495 roll calls (1,492 records, 3 from the Journals)
• PASS: Kansas: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 127 races