How the Michigan scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the House and Senate Journals, each chamber's official record of its session days, which print every roll call with the members by name under how they voted. The Legislature posts each Journal on legislature.mi.gov as a PDF and as a web page. We use every House and Senate floor roll call of the 103rd Legislature, 1,386 roll calls (755 in the House, 631 in the Senate), Jan. 8, 2025 to Oct. 14, 2026. Each chamber numbers its roll calls from 1 each year, and every number of 2025 and 2026 so far is here. Both chambers are still meeting this fall; the pages are updated as new Journals are posted.
• Each roll call's lists are read from the printed Journal (the PDF). Where the Journal's web page was saved from the same word-processing file as the PDF, its lists are read too, and the two must agree name for name (725 roll calls); the other Journals' web pages were made from the PDF and don't keep the order of a list's columns, so for those the PDF alone is used (661).
• A roll call is used only if the names under each heading add up to the count the Journal prints (“Yeas—104”), and every name ties to one member serving that day. All of them did.
• As a check from a second source, each build compares the yeas and nays that each bill's history prints for its roll calls (“passed; given immediate effect Roll Call #165 Yeas 104 Nays 0”) with the Journal's: 1,284 of 1,284 agree, and in each the bill is the one the Journal shows being taken up. The other 102 roll calls, most of them on amendments, aren't named in a bill's history. In one, the history says the bill passed on a roll call the Journal records as a vote on an amendment (SB 691, Senate roll call 32 of March 18, 2026, 15 to 18; the bill passed on roll call 34); the pages follow the Journal.
• What was voted on, and whether it carried, comes from the Journal's sentence just before each list (“Was read a third time and passed”, “The amendment was not adopted”, “The substitute (S-3) was concurred in”). 10 House and 81 Senate roll calls failed.
• Included: the House's election of its Speaker on January 8, 2025 (110 to 0, the Clerk presiding) and the Senate's vote electing an Assistant President pro tempore on September 18, 2025, both yes-or-no votes on one nominee; and the votes on whether a ruling of the Chair stands. The daily attendance roll isn't a vote and isn't counted.
• Committee votes aren't included. Neither are voice votes or rising votes (most motions to give a bill immediate effect), 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: 333 in the House and 362 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 Journals print members by surname, with an initial where two members share a surname or nearly do (“Carter, B.”, “Green, P.”). Each name goes to the one legislator serving in that chamber that day with that surname, the initial picking between two; a name that fit 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. Each House and Senate Journal opens with the day's attendance roll, which names every member serving that day; each build checks it against the members Open States has serving, and every day's roll matched (204 of 205 session days with roll calls; the first, January 8, 2025, prints the members-elect differently, and its one roll call names all 110). Open States gives Representative Tyrone Carter's term an end date of January 1, 2027, the day the next term begins; these pages treat him as serving, as the Journals show him.
• One Senate seat was vacant for part of the term: District 35, whose senator, Kristen McDonald Rivet, had been elected to Congress, was vacant when the 2025 session began, until Chedrick Greene took the oath of office on May 21, 2026 (Senate Journal No. 46).
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and the Senate's own member lists, names and parties. The House lists its members under their caucus, and Representative Karen Whitsett (Democrat, District 4) is on neither list; the House Journal's attendance roll names her on every session day, so she's included.
• Senators' portraits are the official ones on the Senate's list of senators. House members' portraits are their official ones from the Legislature's directory of legislators. The House allows no change to its members' photographs other than resizing, so each is shown whole, only resized, with plain bands where its shape differs from the frame.
• Neither chamber has its own page for each member (the House links each member to their caucus's site), so the pages list each member's official email address and Capitol office instead.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate Majority Leader

• Each chamber's members are compared with its leader: the Speaker of the House, Matt Hall (Republican, District 42), elected Speaker on January 8, 2025, and the Senate Majority Leader, Winnie Brinks (Democrat, District 29). Each held the office for every roll call here, and both vote like any member.
• Why the Majority Leader: the Lieutenant Governor is the President of the Senate and presides, but isn't a senator and votes only to break a tie. The Senate's own rules make the Majority Leader its chief administrator, who refers every bill to a committee; the President pro tempore, Jeremy Moss, presides when the Lieutenant Governor is away.
• 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 755 of 755 House roll calls (nay on 3); the Majority Leader on 631 of 631 Senate roll calls (nay on 81).
• The chambers are led by different parties: Republicans hold the House majority (58 of 110 seats) and Democrats the Senate's (20 of 38 since May 2026).
• 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 (220 in the House, 288 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 Journal shows no vote for them.
• The Senate's Journal names the senators excused and those not voting under each roll call, so the Senate pages say how many were excused (1,032 excused absences in all).
• The House's Journal names only the members voting yea and nay. A member serving that day who isn't named didn't vote, whatever the reason (excused for the day, out of the chamber, or present and not voting), so the House pages give no reason. Who was serving each day is checked against the day's attendance roll.
• Neither chamber records abstentions: a member votes yea or nay or isn't recorded.

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.
• Michigan legislators break from their party on party-line votes more often than members of Congress (one in ten breaks on at least 18.5% of them, against 7.4% in Congress), about as often as Florida's and New York's, so the Michigan pages use the same color steps as those states, 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 House and Senate bill introduced this term, from each bill's page on legislature.mi.gov: 2,431 in the House and 1,213 in the Senate, the budget bills included. Joint resolutions aren't counted: in Michigan they propose amendments to the state constitution, which go to the voters, not the Governor. Neither are resolutions.
• A bill counts for its primary sponsor, the first name on it, whom the bill's page lists with their district; each is tied to the member who held that district on the day the bill was introduced. Co-sponsors aren't counted.
• Passed both chambers: both passed it in the same form and it was enrolled, the step before it goes to the Governor (108 House bills, 83 Senate bills). It became law when it was assigned a Public Act number (the Governor signed it, or it became law without her signature; one, a law for Mackinac Island alone, was numbered as a Local Act), or didn't if she vetoed it and the veto stood (0); 2 were still with the Governor when the data was read. Each build checks that the Public Acts of 2025 and 2026 run from 1 with no number missing or used twice.
• Michigan's bill records mark a local bill only once it's enacted, 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.

Budget projects

• The Michigan pages don't credit legislators with budget items.

The November 3 ballot

• All 110 House seats (two-year terms) and all 38 Senate seats (four-year terms, elected with the Governor) are on the ballot.
• The candidates are the Michigan Bureau of Elections' Official Candidate Listing for the general election, as of Sept. 4, 2026: each party's nominee from the August 4 primary or a minor party's convention, and candidates with no party affiliation who filed petitions. Candidates the listing marks disqualified or withdrawn aren't shown. The listing doesn't mark incumbents: a candidate is the incumbent when the name is the seat's current holder's.
• A federal court ordered the Detroit-area Senate districts redrawn (Agee v. Benson); the new lines, approved in July 2024, are used for this year's Senate races. 14 Senate districts' lines changed: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 23, 24. Today's senators represent the lines they were elected on in 2022 until January 1, 2027. The district map shows those lines; the address lookup finds an address's district on the new lines, and for these districts the lookup's card says the senator shown may not represent the address now. The House's lines were redrawn the same way in 2024 and haven't changed since.

Bill explanations

Michigan vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the bill's catchline, the Legislative Service Bureau's one-line description of it, and the page links to the bill on legislature.mi.gov, where its text, history and the House and Senate Fiscal Agencies' analyses 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 Michigan legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every Michigan 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 Michigan legislator voted on every floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every Michigan bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: Michigan House: current members match the chamber's own list — 110 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Michigan Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 38 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Michigan: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 3,644 sponsor credits on 3,644 bills
• PASS: Michigan: every bill's primary sponsor matched to one legislator, the Public Acts numbered from 1 once each — all of them
• PASS: Michigan: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Michigan: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 148 seats
• PASS: Michigan: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Michigan: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Michigan: every vote page's bill has its title — 1386 votes
• PASS: Michigan: every current legislator has an official portrait — 148 portraits
• PASS: Michigan: the district map has every seat, and only those — 110 House districts, 38 Senate districts
• PASS: Michigan: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Michigan: every roll call's names add up to its printed counts, read alike from the Journal's PDF and HTML, and tie each to one member serving; the Senate's name every senator serving once — all of them
• PASS: Michigan: every roll call number of 2025 and 2026, from 1, is in the Journals — House 2025 375, House 2026 380, Senate 2025 368, Senate 2026 263
• PASS: Michigan: every session day's attendance roll names exactly the members serving that day — 204 of 205 days; no roll printed, every roll call names all serving: 2025-HJ-01-08-001
• PASS: Michigan: the yeas and nays the bills' histories print agree with the Journals' roll calls — 1,284 of 1,284 agree
• PASS: Michigan: where a bill's history says a roll call passed the bill, the Journal records a passage — 1,283 of 1,284; the Journal is followed for 2026-SJ-03-18-026 roll call 32 (SB 691: the history says passed; the Journal, amendment)
• PASS: Michigan: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 148 races