How the Maryland scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the General Assembly's own floor vote records, which the House of Delegates and the Senate post on mgaleg.maryland.gov: one record for each floor roll call, with every member's vote by name. We use every floor roll call of the 2023–2026 term: its four 90-day regular sessions (January to April of 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026) and its two special sessions, on December 16, 2025 and August 3–4, 2026. That's 10,380 roll calls (5,565 in the House, 4,815 in the Senate), Jan. 11, 2023 to Aug. 4, 2026.
• Each record prints the bill's title as it stood on the day of the vote; amendments can rename a bill, so a vote page's title is the one on its record, and the page links to the bill on the General Assembly's site.
• We leave out the 1,567 quorum and attendance calls each chamber takes when it sits; they record who's present, not a decision. A consent calendar, one roll call that passes several bills at once, is one roll call here, titled with the bills it passed. The Senate also takes recorded votes on its citations honoring people and groups; those count like any roll call (they're nearly always unanimous, so they matter mostly for how often a member didn't vote).
• 1 record was posted only as a scan of the paper tally sheet, with members' marks but not what was voted on, so it is left out: votes senate No. 82.
• A roll call is used only if every name on it fits exactly one member serving that day, its lists add up to the counts it prints, and it names every member serving that day exactly once. All of them did. A member sworn in during a session day (Delegate Dylan Behler, on February 6, 2025) is on that day's roll calls only from the oath on.
• Committee votes aren't included. Neither are voice votes, which don't record how each member voted.
• Maryland's constitution passes a bill only with the votes of a majority of all members, 71 in the House and 24 in the Senate, not a majority of those voting. An emergency bill, a proposed constitutional amendment and a vote to override the Governor's veto each need three-fifths of all members, 85 and 29. The records don't print whether a vote passed, so the vote pages show the yeas and nays.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 1,909 in the House and 1,018 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 list members by surname, with an initial where two share one (“Washington, A.”, “Jones, D.”), so each name is tied to the one member serving that day whose name ends with it, and the initial must be theirs. The presiding officer is listed by the chair's title, “Speaker” or “Mr. President”: that's the Speaker or the President, unless the record names them elsewhere (absent, or voting from the floor while another member presides), and then it's the member the record says presided.
• Names and terms come from Open States. Maryland fills a vacant seat by appointment, so members came and went during the term; where Open States' dates differ from the General Assembly's records, we follow the Maryland State Archives' Maryland Manual, whose biographies give the days members were sworn in, resigned or died (23 corrections, among them delegates who moved to the Senate and the days members resigned).
• 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 from mgaleg.maryland.gov. A member without one shows initials.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President

• Maryland's presiding officers vote like any member. Adrienne A. Jones (District 10) was Speaker of the House of Delegates until December 4, 2025; the House elected Joseline A. Peña-Melnyk (District 21) on December 16, 2025, at its special session. Each House roll call is compared with whoever was Speaker that day. Bill Ferguson (District 46) has been President of the Senate for the whole term.
• 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 5,471 of 5,565 House roll calls (nay on 454); the Senate President on 4,795 of 4,815 Senate roll calls (nay on 218).
• 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, and Adrienne Jones's roll calls as Speaker don't count toward her own score.
• 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 (1,790 in the House, 941 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 a member who didn't vote as “Not Voting” or “Excused (Absent)”, an excused absence, which these pages count as excused. A member “Excused from Voting” was excused by the presiding officer from voting on that question, usually because of a conflict of interest; they were present, so that counts as voting, as an abstention does, not as a missed vote.
• Because a bill needs a majority of all members, not voting on it has the same effect on the outcome as voting nay.
• “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.
• Most Maryland legislators rarely break from their party on party-line votes (the median is 0.4%, against 1.7% in Congress), but those who do break more often than members of Congress: one in ten breaks on at least 10.9% of them, against 7.4% in Congress. So, as on the Florida, New Jersey and Pennsylvania pages, each color step starts at twice Congress's level: purple at 20% rather than 10%, then 15, 10, 6 and 3%. That keeps purple for the few who cross most often.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every House and Senate bill of the term's four regular sessions, from the General Assembly's legislation data: 6,034 House bills and 4,220 Senate bills. Joint resolutions and the chambers' own resolutions aren't counted. A proposed constitutional amendment is a bill in Maryland and is counted; passed, it goes to the voters at the next general election.
• A bill counts for its primary sponsor, the first name on it, when that's a delegate or a senator. Co-sponsors aren't counted. Bills a committee, a county delegation, or the Speaker or Senate President on the Governor's behalf introduced aren't credited to anyone (869 House and 600 Senate bills). Neither are the bills of a sponsor who cast no recorded vote in that chamber this term, and so isn't on these pages: 2023 HB 313 (Delegate Washington), 2023 HB 314 (Delegate Washington), 2023 HB 315 (Delegate Washington), 2023 SB 50 (Senator Pinsky).
• Passed both chambers: the General Assembly passed it (3,623 bills, counting each once). It became law when it was given a chapter number: the Governor signed it, it became law without his signature, or the General Assembly overrode his veto (3,602 bills). Governor Moore vetoed 21 bills that weren't overridden. The legislation data for 2025 predates the December 16, 2025 special session, so each vetoed bill's outcome comes from its own page: 19 of the 29 bills vetoed in 2025 became law at that session, and 2 of the 5 vetoed in 2026 at the August 2026 session. Each build checks that every chapter of each year is on one of that year's bills.
• Many bills are cross-filed: the same bill introduced in both chambers. When one passed and its cross-file in the other chamber didn't, the cross-file's sponsor is credited through the one that passed (“passed as SB 28”), so each law counts once in each chamber.
• Maryland 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 appointed during the term had less time to pass bills.

Budget projects

• Maryland's budget bill doesn't say which legislator asked for an item, so there's no budget figure for Maryland legislators.

The November 3 ballot

• Every seat is on the ballot: all 47 senators and all 141 delegates are elected for four-year terms beginning January 13, 2027.
• Candidates come from the State Board of Elections' lists for the 2026 general election, one for State Senator and one for House of Delegates. Only candidates the Board lists as active are shown; a candidate who declined, withdrew or didn't file the signatures a petition needs isn't on the ballot. Write-in candidates aren't printed on the ballot, so a race says only that write-ins are allowed.
• Most House districts elect two or three delegates, and voters there choose up to that many; each race says how many.

Bill explanations

Maryland vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the bill's title as the vote record printed it, and the page links to the bill on the General Assembly's site, with its synopsis, text and fiscal note.

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 Maryland legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every Maryland 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 Maryland House of Delegates member voted on each floor roll call, Feb. 16, 2023 to March 16, 2024 (part 1 of 4).
• member-votes-house-2.csv: How every Maryland House of Delegates member voted on each floor roll call, March 18, 2024 to March 28, 2025 (part 2 of 4).
• member-votes-house-3.csv: How every Maryland House of Delegates member voted on each floor roll call, March 31, 2025 to April 9, 2026 (part 3 of 4).
• member-votes-house-4.csv: How every Maryland House of Delegates member voted on each floor roll call, April 10, 2026 to Aug. 4, 2026 (part 4 of 4).
• member-votes-senate.csv: How every Maryland Senate member voted on each floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every Maryland bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: Maryland House: current members match the chamber's own list — 141 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Maryland Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 47 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Maryland: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 8,785 sponsor credits on 8,785 bills
• PASS: Maryland: every bill's primary sponsor tied to one legislator, every passed bill's outcome known — all of them
• PASS: Maryland: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes-house-1.csv, member-votes-house-2.csv, member-votes-house-3.csv, member-votes-house-4.csv, member-votes-senate.csv
• PASS: Maryland: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 118 seats
• PASS: Maryland: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Maryland: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Maryland: every vote page's bill has its title — 10380 votes
• PASS: Maryland: every current legislator has an official portrait — 195 portraits
• PASS: Maryland: the district map has every seat, and only those — 71 House districts, 47 Senate districts
• PASS: Maryland: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Maryland: every roll call's names fit one member serving that day each, its lists add up to the printed counts, and it names every member serving that day once — all of them
• WARN: Maryland: every vote record has text to read — 1 posted only as a scanned paper tally sheet, left out and listed on the methodology page: https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2026RS/votes/senate/0082.pdf
• PASS: Maryland: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 118 races