How the Kentucky scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the Legislative Record that the Legislative Research Commission publishes for each session: each bill's vote history prints every floor roll call on it, with each member's vote by name. We use every House and Senate floor roll call of the 2025 and 2026 Regular Sessions, 1,585 roll calls (782 in the House, 803 in the Senate), Jan. 7, 2025 to April 15, 2026. Both sessions are over and the General Assembly held no special session, so these records are final.
• The House numbers its roll calls through each session and the Senate keeps one count from session to session, and we account for every number: a roll call on a bill or resolution, or an attendance call. The Record prints no roll call for 2 Senate votes whose tallies the bills' histories give (SB 1, March 14, 2025 (37-0); SB 4, March 13, 2025 (33-4)), so how each senator voted on them isn't known; and 14 roll-call numbers from 2026 have no record anywhere in the Record, with no vote in any bill's history left without one (House 152; Senate 3796, 3822, 3823, 3840, 3857, 3868, 3872, 3941, 4036, 4088, 4137, 4186, 4187). The House and Senate Journals, the official record of each day's proceedings, would settle these, but the Legislative Research Commission doesn't publish them online (the Legislative Record says so); copies are sold in print, so we haven't been able to check them.
• We leave out the attendance roll calls at the start of each legislative day, which aren't votes: 91 in the House and 97 in the Senate. We also leave out 1 roll call that recorded which members joined a resolution as co-sponsors (HR 21, House roll call 7 (Jan. 13, 2026)), and set aside 4 roll calls the Record labels only “Misc”, because it doesn't say what they decided: House roll call 153 (Feb. 25, 2026, on no bill); House roll call 196 (March 4, 2026, on no bill); HB 500, House roll call 425 (April 1, 2026); SB 30, House roll call 438 (April 1, 2026).
• A roll call is used only if its members' votes add up to the counts the record prints and it lists every member serving that day exactly once. On 3 roll calls, the record lists every member but one and its counts add up without them; we use the roll call, and the member it leaves out gets no vote either way: HB 2, Senate roll call 3477 (March 12, 2025), without Shelley Funke Frommeyer; SB 153, Senate roll call 3433 (March 5, 2025), without Robert Stivers; SB 201, Senate roll call 3401 (Feb. 27, 2025), without Robert Stivers.
• A member can file a “vote modification” after a roll call, saying how they would have voted or meant to vote. The chambers print these apart from the roll call, and they don't change it, so they aren't counted here.
• As a check from a second source, each build compares every vote on passage, final passage, a veto override or adoption with the yeas and nays the bill's history prints (“passed 79-19”). 1,360 agree; where they differ, we follow the roll call: SJR 54 in the Senate, March 6, 2026 (roll call 36-0, history 38-0). Where a chamber voted again after a motion to reconsider and the history gives only the second tally, the first roll call still counts: SB 65 in the House, March 27, 2025 (72-15, then 75-18).
• The House's record prints “Final Passage” both for passing a bill again after agreeing to the Senate's changes and for passing it over the Governor's veto; the bill's history that day says which, and the vote pages say “Override of Veto” for the second.
• 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: 273 in the House and 182 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 roll calls name members by the short name each chamber uses: the surname (“Osborne”), with a first initial where two members share it (“Lewis D”, “Stevenson P”), or a whole two-word surname (“Raque Adams”). Each name is tied to the one legislator serving in that chamber on that day whom it fits, using the names Open States records for Kentucky legislators. Every name on every roll call we use matched exactly one legislator.
• Names and terms come from Open States. Where they differ from the General Assembly's own records, we follow those: legislators' full surnames as the House's and Senate's member lists print them (Julie Raque Adams, Cassie Chambers Armstrong, Shelley Funke Frommeyer, Amanda Mays Bledsoe, Ashley Tackett Laferty); Senator Robin Webb's service through the whole term (Open States starts her record on the day she changed parties); and the day Senator David Yates left office, October 8, 2025, when he took the oath as Jefferson County Clerk.
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and the Senate's own member lists, names and parties.
• Photos are the official portraits on the General Assembly's member lists. A former member, who isn't on those lists, shows initials.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President

• Each chamber of the General Assembly elects its presiding officer from its members, and both vote like any member: the Speaker of the House, David Osborne (District 59), and the President of the Senate, Robert Stivers (District 25). Each held the office for every roll call here. Kentucky's Lieutenant Governor doesn't preside over 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 768 of 782 House roll calls (nay on 44); the Senate President on 763 of 803 Senate roll calls (nay on 2).
• Republicans hold large majorities in both chambers, so both leaders are Republicans.
• 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 (230 in the House, 169 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.
• Senator Robin Webb was a Democrat until May 30, 2025, when she became a Republican. Each roll call counts her in the party she belonged to that day, so on the 2025 session's roll calls she is a Democrat; her own party-line score counts only the votes she cast as a Republican, in the 2026 session, and her page's voting record compares her 2025 votes with most Democrats.
• 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.
• Kentucky's records print “Not Voting” without a reason, whether the member was absent or present and didn't vote, so these pages never call a missed vote excused. An abstention (the House's “Abstained”, the Senate's “Pass”) counts as voting, as “Present” does on the Congress pages.
• “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.
• Kentucky legislators break from their party on party-line votes somewhat more often than members of Congress (one in ten does so on at least 10.0% of them, against 7.4% in Congress), so the Kentucky pages use the color steps most states' pages use, twice Congress's: purple at 20% rather than 10%, then 15, 10, 6 and 3%. That keeps purple for the truly moderate.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced in the 2025 and 2026 Regular Sessions, from the Legislative Record: 1,726 House bills and 609 Senate bills, the budget bills included. Resolutions (simple, concurrent and joint) aren't counted, and neither are the 38 bills proposing an amendment to the state constitution, which go to the voters, not the Governor (the General Assembly passed SB 10 (2026), which is on the November 3 ballot).
• A bill counts for its prime sponsor as the Record lists it. Co-sponsors aren't counted. The Record links each prime sponsor to their profile by district, so the sponsor is the legislator who held that seat during the session.
• Passed both chambers: the bill was enrolled and delivered to the Governor (217 House bills, 123 Senate bills). It became law if the Governor signed it, if it became law without his signature (28 bills), or if the General Assembly passed it again over his veto (55 of the 54 bills he vetoed); a bill with only some items vetoed (11) is law. Each build checks every passed bill against the Record's lists of bills that became law and bills vetoed, and every bill on those lists against its history.
• Kentucky 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, and the chairs of the Appropriations and Revenue Committees sponsor the budget bills.

Budget projects

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

The November 3 ballot

• All 100 House seats and the 19 even-numbered Senate seats are on the ballot; the odd-numbered Senate seats were elected in 2024 for terms to 2028. The candidates are the ones the Kentucky Secretary of State's candidate filings for the 2026 General Election listed on October 18, 2026.
• Each party's nominee won its May 19 primary; independent and minor-party candidates filed to run in November. Candidates who withdrew, died or were disqualified aren't listed. Write-in candidates who filed are noted on their race but not named; Kentucky counts write-in votes only for them.
• The filings don't mark incumbents, so a candidate is shown as the incumbent when their name is the seat holder's, allowing for a nickname or a quoted part of a name (“Robert M. "Robby" Mills” is Senator Robby Mills).
• A candidate who serves in the General Assembly now links to their voting record.

Bill explanations

Kentucky vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the bill's official title, and the page links to the bill in the Legislative Record, where its text, summary and fiscal notes 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 Kentucky legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every Kentucky 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 Kentucky legislator voted on every floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every Kentucky bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: Kentucky House: current members match the chamber's own list — 100 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Kentucky Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 38 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Kentucky: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 2,335 sponsor credits on 2,335 bills
• PASS: Kentucky: every bill's prime sponsor matched to one legislator, every passed bill's outcome known — all of them
• PASS: Kentucky: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Kentucky: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 138 seats
• WARN: Kentucky: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — 4 vote(s) not credited (each with its reason): 26rs House #153 (2026-02-25, on no bill): the record labels it only "Misc" and doesn't say what was decided; 26rs House #196 (2026-03-04, on no bill): the record labels it only "Misc" and doesn't say what was decided; HB 500 House #425 (2026-04-01): the record labels it only "Misc" and doesn't say what was decided
• PASS: Kentucky: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Kentucky: every vote page's bill has its title — 1585 votes
• PASS: Kentucky: every current legislator has an official portrait — 138 portraits
• PASS: Kentucky: the district map has every seat, and only those — 100 House districts, 38 Senate districts
• PASS: Kentucky: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Kentucky: every roll call's votes add up to its printed counts, it names every member serving once, and every roll-call number is accounted for — all of them
• PASS: Kentucky: passage tallies agree with the bills' histories — 1,360 of 1,361 agree; the roll call is followed for SJR 54 Senate 2026-03-06 (36-0 vs 38-0)
• PASS: Kentucky: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 119 races