How the Minnesota scores work

The vote records

• We use every House and Senate floor roll call of the 94th Legislature, 1,129 roll calls (481 in the House, 648 in the Senate), Jan. 14, 2025 to May 17, 2026: its 2025 Regular Session (January 14 to May 19, 2025; 188 House and 286 Senate roll calls), its 2025 First Special Session (June 9, 2025; 18 and 45) and its 2026 Regular Session (February 17 to May 18, 2026; 275 and 317).
• The roll calls come from each chamber's Journal, its official record of its proceedings: the Journal of the House, one file a day (house.mn.gov), and the Journal of the Senate (senate.mn). Each prints every roll call with the question, the tally and the name of each member who voted yes and each who voted no. Neither names the members who didn't vote: they're the members serving that day who aren't on either list.
• As a check from a second source, each build compares every House roll call with the House Chamber Voting System's record of it (house.mn.gov/votes), name for name: 476 agree exactly. The voting system files its records by bill, so it doesn't have the 4 House votes on no bill (the temporary rules and two resolutions on the House's organization, and a motion to adjourn). On one roll call they differ: on May 12, 2026, the Journal (page 7218) prints the Smith amendment to H.F. 4138, as amended, adopted 68 to 65, with Rep. Harry Niska voting yes, where the voting system records him voting no (67 to 66). Both record the amendment adopted, and the Journal then records Niska moving to reconsider the vote. These pages follow the Journal, the official record. The voting system cites a different page for 3 roll calls (one a typo, 7435 for 7535), which match by bill, day and tally. It also records each call of the House (6), which isn't a vote.
• Each floor tally on the Revisor of Statutes' bill pages, 603 of them, is a Journal roll call on that bill, in that chamber, on that day. One tally on H.F. 21's page is dated February 27, 2026; the House Journal prints that roll call on February 27, 2025 (page 483), as the voting system does.
• A roll call is used only if its lists add up to its printed tally, every name is the one member serving in that chamber that day it stands for (see Who cast each vote), no member is named twice, and its printed result is a pass or a fail. All of them did.
• Included: each chamber's votes on a bill's passage (its third reading) and repassage (after the other chamber amended it or a conference committee reported); votes on amendments; motions (to suspend the rules, to refer, to lay on or take from the table, to reconsider); declarations of urgency, by which two-thirds of a chamber lets a bill have its readings on one day rather than three different days (Constitution, Article IV, Section 19); appeals of the chair's ruling; the House's temporary rules and the resolutions on its organization; and the Senate's motions on the Governor's appointments. Each vote page says which it was.
• Committee votes aren't included (the Senate Journal prints a few committee roll calls with committee reports). Neither are voice votes, the daily roll of members present, or elections of officers, which are votes for a person, not yes or no: the House elected its Speaker on February 6, 2025 by roll call, 67 votes for Lisa Demuth and 65 for Melissa Hortman (House Journal, page 30).
• Whether a measure passed is what the Journal prints. A bill needs the votes of a majority of the members elected to each chamber, 68 in the House and 34 in the Senate (Constitution, Article IV, Section 22), and each build checks every bill printed as passed against that. 146 House and 241 Senate roll calls failed.
• The Senate's rules let a senator voting from outside the chamber, with their caucus leader's approval, have a designee cast their vote as they direct (Rules 40.7 and 40.8). The Journal lists the senator as voting and adds a note naming who cast the vote, on 643 roll calls; the vote counts as the senator's own.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 261 in the House and 518 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 each member by surname (“Acomb”, “Oumou Verbeten”), with initials where two members of a chamber share one (“Anderson, P. E.”, “Lee, K.”), and the Speaker last (“Spk. Demuth”). The Revisor's author lists print the same names, each linked to the member's page by the Legislature's member number, the number Legislators Past & Present uses for every legislator. So each printed name is tied, through that number, to the one member serving that day; a name that stood for no one serving, or for more than one, would stop the roll call. Every name on every roll call matched. The House Journal of April 13, 2026 prints “Van-Binsbergen” once (page 5697) for Rep. Scott Van Binsbergen, as the voting system's record of that roll call does without the hyphen.
• Names come from Open States, and terms from the Legislative Reference Library's Legislators Past & Present, the Legislature's record of each member's service (where Open States' dates differ, we follow it: 7 dates). The seats that changed hands during the term:
  • House: Melissa Hortman (34B) died on June 14, 2025; Xp Lee took the seat on September 26, 2025, after a special election. Curtis Johnson, elected in 40B in 2024, was never seated (the House Journal of January 14, 2025 lists 133 certificates of election, 40B's blank); David Gottfried took the seat on March 17, 2025, after a special election. Kaohly Vang Her (64A), elected mayor of Saint Paul, and Amanda Hemmingsen-Jaeger (47A), elected to the Senate, left on November 17, 2025; Meg Luger-Nikolai and Shelley Buck took their seats on February 3, 2026. Joe Schomacker (21A) resigned effective June 21, 2026, after the session (the House Journal's record of proceedings after adjournment; the House's member list still shows him).
  • Senate: Kari Dziedzic (60) died on December 27, 2024, before the term began; Doron Clark took the seat on February 3, 2025. Justin Eichorn (6) resigned on March 20, 2025; Keri Heintzeman took the seat on May 6, 2025. Bruce Anderson (29) died on July 21, 2025, and Nicole Mitchell (47) resigned on July 25, 2025; Michael Holmstrom Jr. and Amanda Hemmingsen-Jaeger took their seats on November 18, 2025.
• No member changed parties during the term: every member's record gives one party for the 94th Legislature.
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and the Senate's own member lists, names and parties.
• Each legislator's portrait is their official photo for the 94th Legislature, as their record in Legislators Past & Present shows it. The House's photo policy allows no alteration, including cropping, so every portrait is only resized, on plain bands where its shape differs from the frame.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate Majority Leader

• The House. Its leader is the Speaker, who votes like any member. The November 2024 election gave each party 67 House seats, and with 40B empty the House's meetings from January 14 to February 5, 2025 had no more than 67 members present, which the Secretary of State, presiding, ruled was no quorum (a majority of the House, 68); the Journal records no vote those days but the roll of members present. On February 6, 2025, its first day with a quorum, the House elected Lisa Demuth (Republican, 13A) Speaker and ratified an Agreement for House Organization for a House of 67 Republicans and 67 DFL members, under which each committee had co-chairs from both caucuses. Demuth was Speaker for every House roll call here, and voted on 479 of 481 (no on 84).
• The House had 133 members when it organized, 134 from March 17, 2025, 133 from June 14 to September 26, 2025, 132 from November 18, 2025 to February 3, 2026, and 134 after that, until Joe Schomacker resigned in June 2026. A tie defeats a bill or a motion: 74 House roll calls were ties, and 58 more were decided by one or two votes.
• The Senate. Its President presides, and its Majority Leader leads the majority caucus and the Senate's business. Senators are measured against the Majority Leader, Erin Murphy (DFL, 64): she led the DFL caucus all term, as Senate DFL Leader while the Senate stood 33 to 33 in January 2025, when Bobby Joe Champion and Jeremy Miller were its co-presiding officers, and as Majority Leader since February 3, 2025, when Doron Clark's swearing-in gave the DFL 34 seats. She voted on 644 of 648 Senate roll calls (no on 260). The President, Bobby Joe Champion (DFL, 59), votes too; on the 515 contested roll calls both voted on, they voted alike 510 times.
• The score is the share of roll calls on which the member voted the same way, yes or no, as their chamber's leader. A roll call counts only when both of them voted yes or no.
• 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

• Minnesota's Democratic Party is the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, the DFL, as the Legislature and the ballot name it. These pages count its members as Democrats, in the Democrats' color, and call them the DFL.
• Counts party-line votes: roll calls where most DFL members voted one way and most Republicans the other (210 in the House, 456 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 Journals name only who voted yes and no, and give no reason for anyone who didn't vote: absent, excused or present and not voting alike. So these pages say “didn't vote”, never “missed” or “excused”. Neither chamber records abstentions.
• “In office” means the member held the seat that day, from the day they took the oath to the last day of their term, as Legislators Past & Present records it.

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.
• Minnesota legislators break from their party on party-line votes more often than members of Congress (one in ten breaks on at least 11.0% of them, against 7.4% in Congress), about as often as Arizona's, so the Minnesota pages use the same color steps as Arizona, Florida and Georgia, 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 file and Senate file introduced this term, from the Revisor of Statutes' bill status pages: 5,181 House files and 5,337 Senate files, the 2025 First Special Session's included. Each page gives the bill's authors in order, its every action and the Governor's action.
• A bill counts for its chief author, the first name on it; other authors aren't counted. A House file and a Senate file on the same subject often travel together: when one chamber takes up the other's file in place of its own, the Revisor's page for the file set aside says so (“See Senate file in House SF 1075”), and that bill counts as passed for its own chief author too, as the Senate file did (54 bills), shown apart.
• Passed both chambers: the bill was presented to the Governor (146 House files, 54 Senate files, counting those passed as the other chamber's file). It became law when the Governor signed it, with a chapter number in the session laws: 146 chapters this term (131 from the regular sessions, 15 from the special session). Each build checks every chapter, bill for bill, against the Revisor's lists of the session laws. Governor Tim Walz vetoed no bill this term and no item of one: the Legislative Reference Library's record of vetoes lists none for 2025 or 2026, and no chapter is marked as having items vetoed.
• Minnesota passes much of its law in a few large bills, each carrying many members' proposals, so a member's count of bills passed understates how many of their ideas became law. The Revisor's pages note where a bill's text was taken into another (“See Chapter 36, Article 4., Section 6.”); those aren't counted.
• 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

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

The November 3 ballot

• Every seat is on the ballot: representatives serve two-year terms, and the senators elected in 2022 to four-year terms are up. All 67 Senate districts and 134 House districts are on the 2022 plan's lines.
• The candidates are the Minnesota Secretary of State's, from its candidate table for the November 3 general election (the plain-text file it publishes with each election's results files), read Oct. 18, 2026, with the party names from its party table. Only names, offices and parties are read.

Bill explanations

Minnesota vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the bill's description as the Revisor of Statutes writes it, and the page links to the bill's status page.

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 Minnesota legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every Minnesota 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 Minnesota legislator voted on every floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every Minnesota bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: Minnesota House: current members match the chamber's own list — 133 members and 1 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Minnesota Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 67 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Minnesota: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 10,518 sponsor credits on 10,518 bills
• PASS: Minnesota: every bill's chief author matched to one legislator; laws and vetoes the same as the Revisor's session laws — all of them
• PASS: Minnesota: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Minnesota: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 201 seats
• PASS: Minnesota: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Minnesota: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Minnesota: every vote page's bill has its title — 1129 votes
• PASS: Minnesota: every current legislator has an official portrait — 207 portraits
• PASS: Minnesota: the district map has every seat, and only those — 134 House districts, 67 Senate districts
• PASS: Minnesota: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Minnesota: every roll call's names add up to its printed counts, each the one member serving that day with that Legislature member number, and every result agrees with its tally — all of them
• PASS: Minnesota: the House Journal's roll calls match the House Chamber Voting System's member for member — 476 agree; in the Journal only: 4
• PASS: Minnesota: every floor tally on the Revisor's bill pages is a Journal roll call on that bill — 603 agree
• PASS: Minnesota: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 201 races