How the Mississippi scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the Legislature's bill status system, which publishes each House and Senate floor roll call as the chamber's Journal prints it, with every member's vote by name. Mississippi elects its Legislature for four years, and this term began on January 2, 2024, so we use every floor roll call of its sessions so far: 4,879 roll calls (2,367 in the House, 2,512 in the Senate), Jan. 2, 2024 to July 16, 2026.
  • 2024 Regular Session: 829 House and 915 Senate roll calls, Jan. 2, 2024 to May 4, 2024.
  • 2024 First Extraordinary Session: 5 House and 3 Senate roll calls, Jan. 18, 2024.
  • 2024 Second Extraordinary Session: 3 House and 3 Senate roll calls, Jan. 25, 2024.
  • 2025 Regular Session: 649 House and 694 Senate roll calls, Jan. 9, 2025 to April 3, 2025.
  • 2025 First Extraordinary Session: 93 House and 74 Senate roll calls, May 28, 2025 to May 29, 2025.
  • 2026 Regular Session: 787 House and 817 Senate roll calls, Jan. 7, 2026 to April 15, 2026.
  • 2026 First Extraordinary Session: 1 House and 6 Senate roll calls, July 15, 2026 to July 16, 2026.
• Each roll call is a separate file, numbered by the legislative day and its place in that day: the House's file 0590041 is the 41st roll call of the 59th day. The files don't print a date. A legislative day is a calendar day counted from the session's first, so the 59th day of the 2026 Regular Session, which convened on January 6, was March 5. The bill histories date the actions they link roll calls from, and all but 1 of those dates agree with that count; where one doesn't (SB 2869 of 2025, whose history dates a Senate vote February 11 that is filed under the next day), the record's own day is used.
• Each bill's history on the bill status system links its recorded votes. A roll call no history links to, such as many Senate amendment votes and motions to reconsider, is found by its number: we ask for every number between two linked roll calls on the same day. 12 roll calls were found that way.
• A roll call is used only if each of its lists adds up to the total it prints and it names every member serving that day exactly once; where it prints the chamber's vacant seats (“Vacancies--2”), they must match ours. All of them did. One record misprints a total: the House's override of the veto of HB 1924 on April 15, 2026 names seven members as absent or not voting but prints “Total--5”; its names account for all 122 members, so the names are used.
• 117 roll calls, all in the Senate, decided several measures at once, “en bloc”: confirming nominees, adopting resolutions or passing bills together. Each has one page, titled by its first measure and how many more. When two members agree that neither will vote, a pair, the record names them only in a note saying how each would have voted; they count as not voting (62 roll calls).
• As a second reading, each build compares the result each roll call prints (“passed”, “failed”, “lost”, “adopted”) with the action the measure's history records for it: 5,361 of 5,361 agree. One history links a roll call on another bill (HB 11 of May 2025 links the House's vote on SB 2050); it's counted under the bill the record names.
• Some measures need more than a majority, three-fifths or two-thirds, as the constitution requires for some kinds of bills and to override a veto; their records end with the votes needed (“Necessary for Passage”), 469 roll calls. The vote pages show the result as the record prints it.
• 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: 280 in the House and 318 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 their district where two share it (“Anderson (110th)”) or initials too (“Simmons D. T. (12th)”), and the Speaker as “Mr. Speaker”. Each name goes to the one legislator holding a seat in that chamber that day whose surname it is. Every name on every roll call used matched exactly one legislator.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on Mississippi legislators. Where it differs from the records, we follow sources that say when members left or took office: the deaths of Representatives Andy Stepp (December 5, 2024), Charles Young Jr. (December 19, 2024), Price Wallace (June 3, 2026) and Bo Brown (June 8, 2026); their successors in the first two seats, Perry Bailey and Gregory Elliott, who weren't yet sworn in when the House met on May 28 and 29, 2025 (its records print two vacancies); Senator Jenifer Branning's resignation to join the Supreme Court (January 6, 2025) and Senator David Jordan's retirement (June 30, 2025); and the members who served until the winners of the court-ordered special elections of November 4, 2025 took office on January 6, 2026. Open States also lacks Senator Chris Johnson's District 45 seat, which he held until those elections moved him to District 44.
• Each build checks our current members against the House's roster of July 7, 2026 and the Senate's of September 2, 2026, names and parties. The House's roster is a scanned document: it's read with text recognition, and the 3 district numbers that reading gets wrong were read by eye.
• Photos are the official portraits from the members' pages on the bill status system. A member without one shows initials.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President Pro Tempore

• The Speaker of the House, Jason White (District 48), votes like any member. The Lieutenant Governor, Delbert Hosemann, presides over the Senate but isn't a senator and votes only to break a tie (Mississippi Constitution, Section 129), so senators are compared with the President Pro Tempore, Dean Kirby (District 30), whom the Senate elects and who votes. Both have held their offices since January 2, 2024.
• 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 2,365 of 2,367 House roll calls (nay on 24); the President Pro Tempore on 2,510 of 2,512 Senate roll calls (nay on 25).
• 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 (161 in the House, 185 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.
• Two House members belong to no party (Angela Cockerham and Shanda Yates, both independents). Each is scored against the party they vote with more often on these votes, and placed with it on the charts, as an independent in Congress is with the party they caucus with.
• 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 such members as “Absent or those not voting” and don't say why, so these pages don't say “missed” or “excused”.
• A member who answered “Present” counts as voting: they were there and chose neither yea nor 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 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.
• Mississippi legislators break from their party on party-line votes far more often than members of Congress: one in ten breaks on at least 18.1% of them, against 7.4% in Congress, and the median legislator on 5.2%, against 1.7%. So the Mississippi pages use Florida's color steps, twice Congress's: purple at 20% rather than 10%, then 15, 10, 6 and 3%. That keeps purple for those who cross most often: 12 of the 171 current members, all Democrats who often vote with the Republican majority.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced in the term's sessions, from each bill's history on the bill status system: 6,381 House bills and 3,990 Senate bills, appropriation and revenue bills included. Concurrent and simple resolutions, joint resolutions and the Senate's confirmations of nominees aren't bills and aren't counted.
• A bill counts for its principal authors, as the Legislature lists them. Co-authors aren't counted.
• Passed both chambers: the Speaker and the Lieutenant Governor signed the enrolled bill, which they do once both chambers have passed it in the same form (620 House bills, 552 Senate bills). It became law when the Governor signed it, let it become law without his signature, or vetoed only part of it, or the Legislature overrode his veto, and the session laws give it a chapter number (1,151 laws). It didn't when he vetoed it and the veto stood (21: HB 4053 (2024), HB 4099 (2024), HB 4104 (2024), HB 4124 (2024), HB 922 (2024), SB 2180 (2024), HB 1085 (2025), HB 1126 (2025), HB 569 (2025), HB 924 (2025), SB 2386 (2025), SB 2573 (2025), SB 2840 (2025), SB 2867 (2025), HB 50 (2025), HB 1152 (2026), HB 1648 (2026), HB 895 (2026), SB 2477 (2026), SB 2632 (2026), SB 3402 (2026)). In 2026 the House voted to override the veto of HB 1648 but the Senate never took it up, so that veto stood, though the bill's history lists it as law; it has no chapter number.
• Local and private bills are counted and shown apart (154 passed), and not ranked: bills the chambers sent to their Local and Private committees, for one county, city or district, and bills restoring the right to vote to a named person, private acts that need a two-thirds vote.
• 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 Committees author the budget bills.

Budget projects

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

The November 3 ballot

• No seat is up for its regular election: Mississippi elects its whole Legislature in odd-numbered years, next in November 2027.
• Two House seats left vacant by members' deaths are filled in special elections on November 3: District 70 and District 77. If no candidate wins a majority, the top two meet in a runoff on December 1. Senate District 34, vacant since Senator Juan Barnett resigned on August 31, 2026, has its special election on December 22.
• The candidates are the ones the Secretary of State's sample ballot of September 9, 2026 lists. Special elections to fill a vacancy are nonpartisan: candidates run without a party, and the ballot lists each as “Independent”, which is the label shown. Write-in candidates aren't named.
• The address lookup uses the district lines of 2026, which include the court-ordered 2025 redistricting of House Districts 16, 22, 36, 39 and 41 and Senate Districts 1, 2, 11, 19, 34, 41, 42, 44 and 45. The district map is drawn from the same lines.

Bill explanations

Mississippi vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the bill's short title as the Legislature lists it, and the page links to the bill's history on the Legislature's bill status system, where its text is.

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

Checks

• PASS: Mississippi House: current members match the chamber's own list — 120 members and 2 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Mississippi Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 51 members and 1 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Mississippi: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 10,361 sponsor credits on 10,361 bills
• PASS: Mississippi: every bill's principal author matched to one legislator, every passed bill's outcome known — all of them
• PASS: Mississippi: 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: Mississippi: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 174 seats
• PASS: Mississippi: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Mississippi: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Mississippi: every vote page's bill has its title — 4879 votes
• PASS: Mississippi: every current legislator has an official portrait — 184 portraits
• PASS: Mississippi: the district map has every seat, and only those — 122 House districts, 52 Senate districts
• PASS: Mississippi: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Mississippi: every roll call adds up to its printed totals and names every member serving that day once — all of them
• PASS: Mississippi: each linked roll call's result agrees with the action its bill history records — 5,361 of 5,361 agree
• PASS: Mississippi: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 2 races