How the Missouri scores work

The vote records

• We use every House and Senate floor roll call of the 103rd General Assembly, 1,444 roll calls (1,022 in the House, 422 in the Senate), Jan. 8, 2025 to Sept. 16, 2026. The members elected in November 2024 took office on January 8, 2025, and serve until the 104th General Assembly convenes on January 6, 2027. The General Assembly has met in four sessions, each veto session counted with its regular session:
  • 2025 Regular Session: 466 House and 192 Senate roll calls, Jan. 8, 2025 to Sept. 10, 2025.
  • 2025 First Extraordinary Session: 7 House and 5 Senate roll calls, June 5, 2025 to June 11, 2025.
  • 2025 Second Extraordinary Session: 8 House and 11 Senate roll calls, Sept. 8, 2025 to Sept. 12, 2025.
  • 2026 Regular Session: 541 House and 214 Senate roll calls, Jan. 8, 2026 to Sept. 16, 2026.
• Every roll call comes from its chamber's Journal, the official record of its proceedings, one file for each legislative day: the House's on its document server (documents.house.mo.gov), the Senate's on its site (senate.mo.gov). Each Journal prints a roll call where it was taken, with every member under how they voted: in the House “AYES”, “NOES”, “PRESENT”, “ABSENT WITH LEAVE” and the number of “VACANCIES”; in the Senate “YEAS”, “NAYS”, “Absent”, “Absent with leave”, “Vacancies” and, for a senator the Senate excused from voting on a question because of a conflict of interest (Senate Rule 91), “Excused from voting”.
• A roll call is used only if each list adds up to the count it prints, every name is one member serving in that chamber that day, it names every member serving that day exactly once, and the vacancies it prints are the seats empty that day. All of them did.
• Two checks from a second source, the House's own bill files (its XML exports on documents.house.mo.gov, which list each House bill's actions): the House numbers its roll calls by legislative day, counting every one its Journal prints, and the bill files give the number and totals of 794 roll calls on bills and amendments: each is the Journal's roll call of that number, with the same totals (794 of 794). And the bill files record a tally for each floor action on a House bill in either chamber, and the House's on Senate bills: each of those 705 is a Journal roll call on that bill that day with the same yeas and nays (705 of 705). The House also posts each numbered roll call's own record, marked “unofficial copy”: 794 of them have been compared with the Journal member by member, and 794 agree.
• Most sentences that call a roll name what it was on. Where one doesn't (a motion for the previous question, an amendment, an emergency clause), the roll call is on the measure the Journal last put before the chamber, or, for the previous question, on the motion moved just before it; 146 of 146 such roll calls are confirmed by the measure's own action history, whose entries that day cite the same Journal pages (one by reading the Journal). A Senate amendment that amends a day's Journal rather than a bill is shown as on no bill.
• Included: third readings and final passage, the House's votes to perfect a bill (its approval of a bill as amended before third reading) and on amendments when members demand a recorded vote, emergency clauses, conference reports, votes to concur in the other chamber's changes, motions for the previous question (which end debate), the House's approval of each day's Journal, veto overrides, the election of each chamber's officers, and other motions. Each vote page says which it was.
• Left out: the 35 attendance calls the House Journal prints as lists of “AYES” (a quorum call, the roll at a joint session of both chambers, the first day's roll), which aren't votes; committee votes; and voice votes, which don't record how each member voted.
• Whether a question carried is what the Journal prints (“passed”, “adopted”, “defeated”, “failed of adoption”). 54 House and 15 Senate roll calls failed.
• A legislative day can run past midnight; its roll calls carry the day's date, as the Journal heads them.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 526 in the House and 186 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 name members by surname, with the district where two share one or have similar names (“Brown 149” and “Brown 16” in the House, “Brown (16)” and “Brown (26)” in the Senate), and the Speaker as “Mr. Speaker”. Each name goes to the one member of that chamber holding a seat that day whose surname it is (in the district printed). Every name on every roll call used matched exactly one member.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on Missouri legislators, leaving out 3 records it holds twice for the same representative. Where its dates differ from the records, we follow the records: Representatives Michael O'Donnell (who resigned January 15, 2025), Ben Baker (May 4, 2025), Donnie Brown (August 31, 2025), Justin Sparks (November 24, 2025), Ian Mackey and Aaron Crossley (both August 31, 2026), each by the letter of resignation the House Journal prints, and Senator Travis Fitzwater (May 15, 2026), by his letter in the Senate Journal; Representative Ken Waller died on August 24, 2025, and Representative Dirk Deaton resigned on August 9, 2026. No special election filled any of those seats during the term, so each stayed empty: the Journals print the vacancies.
• No legislator changed parties during the term.
• Each build checks our current members against each chamber's own list, names and parties: the House's member files for each district (refreshed October 16, 2026; an empty one is a vacant seat) and the Senate's list of senators.
• Photos are the official portraits: the Senate's from each senator's page on its site, and the House's from its members' photos. The House's are its own 100 by 150 pixel originals, trimmed at the bottom to the site's portrait shape and shown at their own size, never enlarged, so they appear smaller than other portraits. A member without one shows initials.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President Pro Tem

• The Speaker of the House, Jon Patterson (District 30), votes like any member; the House elected him on January 8, 2025, 152 to 10 (House Journal, page 8). The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate but isn't a senator and votes only to break a tie (Missouri Constitution, Article IV, Section 10), so senators are compared with the President Pro Tem, Cindy O'Laughlin (District 18), whom the Senate elected the same day and who votes. Both have held their offices since.
• 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 966 of 1,022 House roll calls (nay on 54); the President Pro Tem on 399 of 422 Senate roll calls (nay on 17).
• Both leaders are Republicans, the majority party in both chambers.
• 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 (361 in the House, 88 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: “ABSENT WITH LEAVE” (excused) and, in the Senate, “Absent”.
• A representative who voted “PRESENT” counts as voting: they were there and chose neither yea nor nay. So does a senator the Senate excused from voting on a question because of a conflict of interest (22 times on 22 roll calls).
• “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.
• Missouri legislators break from their party on party-line votes more often than members of Congress: one in ten breaks on at least 12.4% of them, against 7.4% in Congress, and the median legislator on 3.9%, against 1.7%. So the Missouri 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 those who cross most often: 3 of the 188 current members.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every House and Senate bill introduced in the term's sessions, the budget bills included: 3,559 House bills (the House's committee bills among them) and 1,827 Senate bills, from the House's bill files and the Senate's bill tracking. Joint resolutions, which propose constitutional amendments to the voters, and concurrent and simple resolutions aren't bills and aren't counted.
• A bill counts for its sponsor, the member who introduced it, tied to the member holding that district on the day. Co-sponsors aren't counted.
• Passed both chambers: “truly agreed to and finally passed” (96 House bills, 68 Senate bills). It became law when the Governor approved it, or vetoed only some items of it, as he may do in an appropriation bill (Constitution, Article IV, Section 26): 24 budget bills became law that way (164 laws in all). It didn't when he vetoed the whole bill and the veto stood (0). In the September 2025 veto session the House voted on overriding the line-item vetoes in five budget bills; each motion failed. Each build checks the Senate bills' outcomes against the House's own record of the Senate bills it passed (68 agree).
• Missouri 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 who took office during the term had less time to pass bills, and the Budget Committee's chair sponsors the House's budget bills.

Budget projects

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

The November 3 ballot

• All 163 House seats are on the ballot (representatives serve two-year terms), and the 17 even-numbered Senate seats (senators serve four, and the odd-numbered districts are next elected in 2028).
• The candidates are the ones the Secretary of State certified on August 25, 2026: each party's nominee from the August 4 primary (Republican, Democratic, Libertarian) and the independent candidates. Missouri prints a race's only candidate on the ballot. Write-in candidates file later and aren't listed.
• The address lookup and the district map use the House and Senate districts drawn after the 2020 census, first used in 2022; the 2025 redistricting changed only Missouri's congressional districts.

Bill explanations

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

Checks

• PASS: Missouri House: current members match the chamber's own list — 155 members and 8 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Missouri Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 33 members and 1 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Missouri: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 5,386 sponsor credits on 5,386 bills
• PASS: Missouri: every bill's sponsor matched to the member holding the district; every passed bill's outcome known, and the Senate bills' the same as the House's record of them — Senate bills' outcomes: 68 agree
• PASS: Missouri: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Missouri: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 197 seats
• PASS: Missouri: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Missouri: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Missouri: every vote page's bill has its title — 1444 votes
• PASS: Missouri: every current legislator has an official portrait — 197 portraits
• PASS: Missouri: the district map has every seat, and only those — 163 House districts, 34 Senate districts
• PASS: Missouri: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Missouri: every roll call's names add up to its printed counts, fit one member serving that day each, name every member serving once and leave empty the seats vacant that day — all of them
• PASS: Missouri: each roll call the House's bill files number (day and roll call) is the Journal's, with the same totals — 794 of 794 agree
• PASS: Missouri: every roll call whose sentence doesn't name its measure (the previous question, an amendment) is on the measure its action history shows before the chamber that day — 145 confirmed by the measures' actions, 1 by reading the Journal
• PASS: Missouri: every saved House roll-call record agrees with the Journal's roll call of its number, member for member — 794 of 794 records agree
• PASS: Missouri: every floor tally in the House's bill files (both chambers' votes on House bills) is a Journal roll call — 705 of 705 found
• PASS: Missouri: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 180 races