How the Massachusetts scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the Legislature's own records on malegislature.gov. We use every House and Senate floor roll call of the 194th General Court (2025–2026), 505 roll calls (268 in the House, 237 in the Senate), Feb. 6, 2025 to July 31, 2026.
• Senate: the Legislature's public API records each roll call with every senator's member code under how they voted, and each roll call's official record, a PDF, prints the bill, the question, every senator by name and the counts. A roll call is used only if its names add up to its printed counts, every senator serving that day is named once, and the API's codes agree with the record name for name. The API leaves out 7 absences the official record prints; the record is followed.
• House: each session day's roll calls are a PDF on the House Journal pages, and each year's roll calls are also in one combined file; each roll call is in at least one of them, and where it's in both, the two agree vote for vote (1 differs only in whether a vote is marked as recorded after the roll call closed). Each roll call prints the bill, the question, the date and time, the counts, and every representative with a mark for how they voted. A roll call is used only if its marks add up to its printed counts and every representative serving that day is named once.
• As a check from a second source, each build compares every roll call with the House and Senate Journals, the chambers' official record of each day, which print each roll call's yeas and nays and what it decided, and with each bill's history, which prints most roll calls' tallies; the results are under Checks. The Senate's records don't print the day: each Senate roll call's day is the one its bill's history records it on, with the time, or where no history mentions it, the day the Senate Journal prints it under (a session that recesses to another day goes on in the same Journal under that day's heading); where both have it, they agree. 38 Senate roll calls, from October 2025 to July 2026 (among them the 15 votes of October 2025 to override the Governor's vetoes of items in the budget, H.4240), aren't printed in any Senate Journal on the Legislature's site; the bills' histories record them.
• We leave out roll calls that aren't a vote on a question: 2 House quorum calls, and the elections of the Speaker and the Senate President on January 1, 2025, which are elections between candidates. Senate roll call 1, which the Legislature's records list with no question and no votes, isn't included either.
• Both chambers adopt many budget amendments at once: the House as “consolidated amendments” grouped by subject, the Senate as amendments “considered as one”. Each such roll call has its own page.
• Committee votes aren't included. Neither are voice votes or standing votes, which don't record how each member voted.
• The Journals say what each roll call decided (“the amendment was rejected”, “the bill was passed to be enacted”), and the vote pages show it where they do. 73 House and 56 Senate roll calls failed.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 106 in the House and 78 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 Senate's records print each senator by name, surname first (“Driscoll, Jr., William J.”); each name goes to the one senator serving that day with that surname and given name, and the API's member codes, the Legislature's own identifiers, must point to the same senator.
• The House's records print each representative by surname, with an initial where two share one (“Moran, M.”), and the Speaker as “Mr. Speaker”. Each name goes to the one representative serving that day with that surname (and initial); a name that fits no one, or more than one, would stop the roll call. Every name on every roll call matched.
• Names and terms come from Open States, tied to the Legislature's member codes. Where its dates differ from the Legislature's own records, we follow those: the House Journal's record of Representative Jerald Parisella's resignation on January 1, 2025, before the 194th General Court began; Representative Carol Doherty's oath on February 5, 2025 and her death on February 15, 2025 (State House News Service); Representative Ann-Margaret Ferrante's death on November 27, 2025; Senator Edward J. Kennedy's death on October 1, 2025 (news reports; the Senate declared his seat vacant on October 20); and the resignation letters of Representatives Natalie Blais (January 19, 2026), Vanna Howard (March 17, 2026, to take her Senate seat the next day) and Rodney Elliott (effective August 1, 2026).
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and the Senate's own member lists, names and parties.
• Photos are each member's official portrait from their profile on the Legislature's website, malegislature.gov. A member without one shows initials.
• Massachusetts names its districts (“5th Essex”, “Plymouth and Barnstable”) rather than numbering them; the pages use those names. Each matches one of the Census Bureau's districts, which the map and the address lookup use.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate Majority Leader

• House members are compared with the Speaker, Ronald Mariano, re-elected Speaker on January 1, 2025. The Speaker votes as “Mr. Speaker”: on 260 of 268 House roll calls (nay on 70).
• The Senate President, Karen Spilka, presides over the Senate and is listed only on the roll calls she votes on: 65 of 237. That's too few contested votes to compare senators with her, so senators are compared with the Senate Majority Leader, Cynthia Stone Creem, whose appointment the Senate President announced on February 26, 2025. Senate roll calls before that day are compared with no one. The Majority Leader voted on 214 of 237 Senate roll calls (nay on 44). The Senate President's pages show no missed-vote share.
• Both leaders are Democrats, the majority party in both chambers.
• 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 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 (111 in the House, 86 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 member of neither party (Representative Susannah Whipps is unenrolled) is scored against the party they vote with more often, and placed with it on the seat chart.
• 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 House's “X” (not voting) and the Senate's “Absent or not voting”.
• A House member can also answer “present” (“P”), voting on neither side. These pages count that as abstaining: a vote cast, so it isn't a missed vote and isn't compared with the leader or the party.
• The House's records mark a vote recorded after the roll call closed (“*”); the counts include it, and so do these pages (346 such votes).
• “In office” means the roll call lists the member: each one lists every seated member, whether or not they voted. The Senate's records list the Senate President only when she votes; on the other Senate roll calls these pages count her as not voting, so a Senate vote page's “didn't vote” can be one more than the record's “absent or not voting”, and the page says so.

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 10 of those votes.
• Massachusetts legislators break from their party on party-line votes about as often as members of Congress (one in ten breaks on at least 6.3% of them, against 7.4% in Congress), so the Massachusetts pages use Congress's own color steps: purple at 10%, then 7.5, 5, 3 and 1.5%. Senators break more often than House members: one senator in ten on at least 16.3% of party-line votes, one House member in ten on at least 5.4%.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill and resolve filed this session, from the Legislature's records: 5,280 in the House and 2,999 in the Senate. Resolves count because, like bills, they go to the Governor and can become law. Orders, resolutions, study orders and proposed constitutional amendments aren't counted.
• A bill counts for its primary sponsor, as the Legislature records it by member code. Co-sponsors aren't counted. A committee's new draft carries the committee's name, not the names of the members who filed the bills it replaced, and the Governor and other officers file bills too: those (967 bills, 92 of the 358 that passed both chambers) count for no one, so the counts here understate how much any one member's ideas became law.
• Passed both chambers: both enacted it, the final vote before it goes to the Governor (296 House bills, 62 Senate bills). It became law when it became a chapter of the Acts (339); it didn't if the Governor vetoed it and the veto stood (0). In the Legislature's records as read for this build, 19 bills that passed both chambers aren't law or vetoed yet: they're on the Governor's desk, or she returned them with an amendment the Legislature hasn't finished acting on. Each build checks every bill's chapter against the Legislature's session laws of 2025 and 2026, chapter for chapter.
• Massachusetts files local bills (a town's charter, a liquor license) like any other, 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 session had less time to pass bills.

Budget projects

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

The November 3 ballot

• All 160 House seats and all 40 Senate seats are on the ballot: Massachusetts representatives and senators both serve two-year terms.
• The candidates are the Secretary of the Commonwealth's list for the November 3 State Election (“2026 State Election Candidates”, the Elections Division), read Oct. 18, 2026: every candidate for State Senator and State Representative, with each one's party or the political designation the candidate chose (“Unenrolled”, “Independent”, “Gulf War Veteran”). The Secretary's website answers automated readers with a bot check, so the page was saved by hand. The list prints no designation for three candidates and “Demo” for one; each won that party's September 1 primary in the district, as the Secretary's official primary results record, and is shown with that party. A race with one candidate is marked unopposed. Write-in candidates aren't listed. The list also prints each candidate's street address; these pages don't keep it.

Bill explanations

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

Checks

• PASS: Massachusetts House: current members match the chamber's own list — 157 members and 3 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Massachusetts Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 40 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Massachusetts: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 7,312 sponsor credits on 7,312 bills
• PASS: Massachusetts: every bill's primary sponsor matched to one legislator, every session law on its bill's history — all of them
• PASS: Massachusetts: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Massachusetts: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 200 seats
• PASS: Massachusetts: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Massachusetts: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Massachusetts: every vote page's bill has its title — 505 votes
• PASS: Massachusetts: every current legislator has an official portrait — 203 portraits
• PASS: Massachusetts: the district map has every seat, and only those — 160 House districts, 40 Senate districts
• PASS: Massachusetts: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Massachusetts: every roll call's names add up to its printed counts and name every member serving that day once — all of them
• PASS: Massachusetts: the House and Senate Journals print the same yeas and nays — 467 of 467 agree; 38 Senate roll calls no Senate Journal on the site prints
• PASS: Massachusetts: every roll call the House Journal prints is on a House roll-call file — all of them
• PASS: Massachusetts: the bills' histories print the same yeas and nays, or the Journal confirms the roll call's — 483 of 499 agree; 16 differ where the Journal prints the roll call's tally, e.g. House 38 (H4000): history 27-129, roll call 28-128; House 121 (H4993): history 154-0, roll call 154-1; House 135 (H5151): history 25-129, roll call 25-130
• PASS: Massachusetts: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 200 races