How the Louisiana scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the record the chamber's voting system prints for it, which the Legislature posts on each bill's or resolution's page on legis.la.gov: the chamber's sequence number, the date and time, the question, and every member's vote by name. Louisiana elects its Legislature for four years, and this term began on January 8, 2024, so we use every floor roll call of its sessions so far: 8,004 roll calls (4,273 in the House, 3,731 in the Senate), Jan. 8, 2024 to June 1, 2026.
  • 2024 Organizational Session: 0 House and 4 Senate roll calls, Jan. 8, 2024.
  • 2024 First Extraordinary Session: 14 House and 8 Senate roll calls, Jan. 15, 2024 to Jan. 19, 2024.
  • 2024 Second Extraordinary Session: 73 House and 48 Senate roll calls, Feb. 19, 2024 to Feb. 29, 2024.
  • 2024 Regular Session: 1,479 House and 1,330 Senate roll calls, March 11, 2024 to June 3, 2024.
  • 2024 Third Extraordinary Session: 47 House and 25 Senate roll calls, Nov. 6, 2024 to Nov. 22, 2024.
  • 2025 Regular Session: 1,037 House and 864 Senate roll calls, April 14, 2025 to June 12, 2025.
  • 2025 First Extraordinary Session: 6 House and 10 Senate roll calls, Oct. 23, 2025 to Oct. 29, 2025.
  • 2026 Regular Session: 1,617 House and 1,442 Senate roll calls, March 9, 2026 to June 1, 2026.
• Every record is checked against its chamber's Journal, the official account of each day: it must be a vote the Journal prints that day with the same yeas and nays (and the same absences, where the Journal lists them), on the same bill where the Journal says which. 7,960 records match. The Journal prints most roll calls with every member's name, and for 7,187 of them the names are the record's, member for member; it prints the others, mostly House votes on amendments, motions and resolutions, as a tally only (“By a vote of 35 yeas and 68 nays, the amendments were rejected”).
• A record's heading doesn't always name the question put: for 14 roll calls it reads “Refer to the committee” or “Recommit to the committee” where the Journal records a motion to suspend the rules (or to discharge a committee) in order to do so, or it names final passage, adoption or concurrence where the Journal records a vote on an amendment, on concurring in the other chamber's amendments or on a conference committee report. The pages follow the Journal. The result each page shows is the Journal's (“the above bill was finally passed”, “the amendments were rejected”); where its words don't say, the page shows none.
• 35 roll calls appear only in the Journals, which print every member's vote on them: the Senate's elections of its officers on January 8, 2024, both chambers' elections of the Director of Capitol Security, the Senate's votes confirming the Governor's appointees, Senate motions to suspend the rules, and a few votes on bills and resolutions, nearly all in the Senate, for which the Legislature posts no voting-system record. They're used from the Journal's own lists, under the same rules.
• Left out: 1 quorum call (which isn't a vote); 272 uses of the voting system for members to ask to be added as co-authors of a bill or resolution (“Co-authors”: yea means “add me”) and 1 request to lock the voting machines before a vote, which aren't votes on a question and which the Journals don't print; 2 votes the Journal prints only as a tally that no record names members for, since no one can be credited with them; and 22 records that don't agree with the Journal, since we can't tell which of the two official accounts is right:
  • HB 3, House, Feb. 22, 2024: the record 96–6, the Journal 96–0.
  • HB 7, House, April 4, 2024: the record 101–0, the Journal 95–6.
  • HB 659, House, April 8, 2024: both 99–0, but they name different members.
  • HR 26, House, April 9, 2024: the record 98–0, the Journal 97–0.
  • HCR 33, House, May 1, 2024: the record 90–3, the Journal 89–3.
  • HB 800, House, May 7, 2024: the record 31–71, the Journal 33–69.
  • HB 800, House, May 7, 2024: the record 30–71, the Journal 29–71.
  • SB 466, House, May 22, 2024: the record 58–32, the Journal 58–31.
  • HB 424, Senate, May 22, 2024: the record (1–0) isn't in the Journal.
  • HB 424, Senate, May 22, 2024: the record (0–0) isn't in the Journal.
  • HR 313, House, May 31, 2024: the record 96–0, the Journal 97–0.
  • HB 7, House, Nov. 11, 2024: the record 71–18, the Journal 73–14.
  • HB 582, House, May 12, 2025: the record 64–27, the Journal 65–26.
  • HB 475, Senate, June 8, 2025: both 38–0, but they name different members.
  • HB 1009, House, April 1, 2026: the record 87–0, the Journal 86–0.
  • HR 15, House, April 9, 2026: the record 66–32, the Journal 65–32.
  • HB 294, House, April 9, 2026: the record (27–57) isn't in the Journal.
  • HB 681, Senate, May 13, 2026: the record (36–0) isn't in the Journal.
  • SCR 40, House, May 27, 2026: the record 95–0, the Journal 94–0.
  • HB 342, Senate, May 27, 2026: both 35–0, but they name different members.
  • HB 71, House, May 29, 2026: the record 72–25, the Journal 73–24.
  • SB 237, House: the record is dated May 31, 2026, and the Journal prints the same vote (89–1) on June 1, 2026.
• The House Journal of June 3, 2025, is posted only as page images, so its tallies were read by text recognition and compared with that day's records. 9 records the reading couldn't pair are used from the voting system's record without that check.
• 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: 986 in the House and 498 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 name members by surname, with an initial where two in the chamber share it (“Carter, R.”, “Johnson, T.”), and each chamber's presiding officer as “Mr. Speaker” or “Mr. President”. Each name goes to the one legislator holding a seat in that chamber that day whose surname it is, and each record must name every member serving that day exactly once. Every name on every roll call used matched exactly one legislator. Sen. Katrina Jackson-Andrews is “Jackson” in the Senate's records of January 2024, and Rep. Kellee Hennessy Dickerson is “Dickerson”, as the House lists her.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on Louisiana legislators. Where it differs from the official record, we follow the House's Members History, the resignation letters and oaths the Journals print, and the Speaker's proclamations of special elections (20 dates). In the House, Reps. Brach Myers (District 45) and Larry Selders (District 67) resigned on March 10, 2025, to take Senate seats; Annie Spell took District 45 on March 25, 2025, and Terry Landry Jr. District 67 on May 19, 2025. Chad Brown (District 60) resigned on November 16, 2025, Troy Romero (37) and Jason Hughes (100) on December 14, 2025, Paula Davis (69) on January 9, 2026, Matthew Willard (97) on January 11, 2026, and Julie Emerson (39) on February 14, 2026; their successors, Ed Murray (97), Reese “Skip” Broussard (37), Chasity Martinez (60), Doyle Boudreaux (39), Paul Sawyer (69) and Dana Henry (100), took office between February 19 and March 24, 2026. Joe Stagni (92) resigned on June 30, 2026, and Mark Wright (77) on September 7, 2026. In the Senate, Cleo Fields (District 14) and Jean-Paul Coussan (District 23) resigned on December 31, 2024; Larry Selders and Brach Myers took their seats on March 11, 2025. Joe Bouie (District 3) resigned on October 15, 2025, and Sidney Barthelemy II took his seat on March 24, 2026. Sen. Selders died on July 7, 2026.
• No member changed parties during the term. Two did shortly before it, in April 2023, as the House's Members History records: Rep. Jeremy LaCombe, elected as a Democrat, became a Republican, and Rep. Roy Daryl Adams, elected as an independent, became a Democrat (the History's list of current members still shows him as an independent).
• Each build checks our current members against the House's member list of 2026-10-20 and the Senate's of 2026-10-20, names and parties.
• Photos are the official portraits from each chamber's member list. A member who has left keeps no portrait there (the file now shows their successor, or a blank for a vacant seat), so theirs is the same official file as the Internet Archive saved it while they held the seat.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President

• Each chamber elects its own presiding officer, who votes like any member: the House elected Speaker Phillip DeVillier (District 41) and the Senate elected Cameron Henry (District 9) its President on January 8, 2024. Louisiana'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 2,691 of 4,273 House roll calls (nay on 125); the Senate President on 3,561 of 3,731 Senate roll calls (nay on 65).
• 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 (654 in the House, 398 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 Louisiana 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 record shows no vote for them. The records list every member who didn't vote as “Absent” and don't say why, so these pages don't say “missed” or “excused”.
• “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.
• Louisiana legislators break from their party on party-line votes far more often than members of Congress: one in ten breaks on at least 16.8% of them, against 7.4% in Congress, and the median legislator on 6.2%, against 1.7%. So the Louisiana pages use the color steps of Mississippi and Florida, 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: 9 of the 141 current members, all in the House.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced in the term's sessions, from each bill's page on legis.la.gov: 3,009 House bills and 1,318 Senate bills, proposed constitutional amendments, appropriation and revenue bills included. Resolutions, concurrent resolutions and study requests aren't laws and aren't counted; neither are bills withdrawn from the files.
• A bill counts for its author, the member legis.la.gov lists as its primary author. Co-authors aren't counted, and a committee's bill counts for no one.
• Passed both chambers: the bill was enrolled and sent to the Governor, or, for a constitutional amendment, to the Secretary of State for the voters (1,568 House bills, 806 Senate bills). It became law when it became an Act, signed by the Governor, signed with line-item vetoes (10, budget bills) or law without his signature (2,301 laws). 48 were vetoed; no veto session met this term, so each veto stood. 25 proposed constitutional amendments went to the voters.
• Each session's Acts, numbered from 1, must be exactly the Act numbers its bills' histories give, each once, as many as the session's list of Acts counts; and the bills vetoed and the laws signed with line-item vetoes must be exactly the ones its list of vetoed bills names. Both hold for every session.
• 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 Ways and Means committees author the budget bills.

Budget projects

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

The November 3 ballot

• No seat is up for its regular election: Louisiana elects its whole Legislature every four years, next in the fall of 2027.
• House District 92, in Jefferson Parish, is on the ballot: Rep. Joe Stagni resigned effective June 30, 2026, and the Speaker's proclamation of that day set a special election. Every candidate, of whatever party, runs on one ballot; one who wins a majority is elected, and if no one does, the top two meet in the special general election on December 12. Senate District 14's special election, for the seat of Sen. Larry Selders, who died on July 7, is on December 12, and House District 77's, for the seat Rep. Mark Wright left on September 7, begins on February 6, 2027.
• The candidates are the ones the Secretary of State's Candidate Inquiry lists for the November 3 election, read on October 19, 2026, with the party each qualified with. The Secretary of State's site doesn't allow automated reading, so the list was read once through a browser; only names and parties were kept.
• The address lookup and the district map use the districts the Legislature drew in 2022, the ones the members elected in 2023 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, 687 of the Louisiana House's 4,273 roll calls and 396 of the Louisiana Senate's 3,731 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

Louisiana vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the instrument's short title as legis.la.gov lists it, and the page links to the instrument's page there, where its text, digests 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 Louisiana legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every Louisiana 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-house-1.csv: How every Louisiana House member voted on each floor roll call, Jan. 17, 2024 to June 8, 2025 (part 1 of 2).
• member-votes-house-2.csv: How every Louisiana House member voted on each floor roll call, June 9, 2025 to June 1, 2026 (part 2 of 2).
• member-votes-senate.csv: How every Louisiana Senate member voted on each floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every Louisiana bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: Louisiana House: current members match the chamber's own list — 103 members and 2 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Louisiana Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 38 members and 1 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Louisiana: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 4,327 sponsor credits on 4,327 bills
• PASS: Louisiana: every bill's author tied to one legislator; every bill that passed both chambers law, vetoed or pending, and the laws and vetoes the same as the session's own lists — 2,326 Acts and 48 vetoes agree with the session lists
• PASS: Louisiana: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes-house-1.csv, member-votes-house-2.csv, member-votes-senate.csv
• PASS: Louisiana: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 144 seats
• PASS: Louisiana: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Louisiana: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Louisiana: every vote page's bill has its title — 8004 votes
• PASS: Louisiana: every current legislator has an official portrait — 155 portraits
• PASS: Louisiana: the district map has every seat, and only those — 105 House districts, 39 Senate districts
• PASS: Louisiana: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Louisiana: every roll call's record adds up to its printed totals and names every member serving that day once, each tied to the one member holding a seat — all of them
• PASS: Louisiana: every record is a vote its chamber's Journal prints that day, with the same tally, and the same names where it prints them — 7,960 records matched (7,187 name for name);
• PASS: Louisiana: every vote the Journals print is on the pages, or counted as one with no record of names — 35 from the Journal's own lists; 2 printed as a tally only, left out
• PASS: Louisiana: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 1 races