How the Montana scores work

The vote records

• This term is the 69th Legislature, whose members took office on January 6, 2025. Montana's Legislature meets in regular session only in odd-numbered years, and it held no special session in 2025 or 2026, so the term's floor votes are all from its 2025 Regular Session (January 6 to April 30, 2025): 5,503 floor roll calls (2,721 in the House, 2,782 in the Senate), Jan. 8, 2025 to April 30, 2025. There was no 2026 session.
• Every roll call is a vote the Legislature's bill system (bills.legmt.gov) records on a bill: a step in its history whose wording says what stage it was (“2nd Reading”, “3rd Reading Senate Amendments”), the motion as moved (“Do Pass”, “Do Not Concur”) and the time, or a vote on the bill on no step of its history (60: cloture, motions to rerefer or reconsider, some amendments). The yeas are always for the motion moved. Montana debates and amends a bill on second reading and passes it on third reading, usually the next legislative day; the second chamber's passage is recorded as “concurred”, and when it amends a bill the first chamber votes on its amendments on second reading and passes the bill as amended on third.
• Each member's vote comes from the chamber's Journal, the official record of the floor, which prints every roll call with each member by name. Each roll call must be a Journal roll call on that bill that day, and the Journal's yeas and nays must be the same members as a second record's: the Legislature's voting system, as its data service holds it (5,443 roll calls), or LegiScan's copy of it (CC BY 4.0; 0). Whether a question carried is the Journal's sentence before the lists (“The motion to reconsider HB 522 failed as follows:”); 28 history steps' results describe the bill rather than the question voted on, and the Journal's word is used.
• The Journals have misprints, settled only where the second record settles them: 0 roll calls with a name that fits no member (“Spruger”, “Hinkle H”, “Excused: Excused.”), each the one member serving the Journal names nowhere whom the second record has on that list; 22 whose printed total doesn't count its own names; 1 that leave a member who didn't vote off every list. On 440 roll calls the Journal and the voting system differ only on whether a member who didn't vote was excused or absent: the Journal's word is used. A member who was excused may still vote by absentee ballot; the Journal lists those votes, and they count.
• A motion to take a bill from a House committee failed six times with more yeas than nays, and four proposed constitutional amendments failed in the Senate with majorities: the Journal records each as failed (an amendment needs two-thirds of the whole Legislature).
• Left out, because the records disagree in a way neither settles: 63 roll calls (Senate SB34 2025-01-21 #35 (no Journal roll call on SB34 that day with the same yeas and nays); House HB99 2025-01-22 #158 (no Journal roll call on HB99 that day with the same yeas and nays); House HB65 2025-01-24 #224 (no Journal roll call on HB65 that day with the same yeas and nays); House HB15 2025-01-27 #244 (no Journal roll call on HB15 that day with the same yeas and nays); Senate SB15 2025-01-29 #110 (no Journal roll call on SB15 that day with the same yeas and nays); House HR2 2025-02-05 #425 (no Journal roll call on HR2 that day with the same yeas and nays); House HB301 2025-02-11 #519 (no Journal roll call on HB301 that day with the same yeas and nays); Senate SB43 2025-02-17 #408 (no Journal roll call on SB43 that day with the same yeas and nays); House HB320 2025-02-19 #625 (no Journal roll call on HB320 that day with the same yeas and nays); House HJ11 2025-02-19 #636 (no Journal roll call on HJ11 that day with the same yeas and nays); House HB552 2025-03-03 #916 (no Journal roll call on HB552 that day with the same yeas and nays); House HB311 2025-03-04 #951 (no Journal roll call on HB311 that day with the same yeas and nays)…).
• The Journals print 354 roll calls the bill system doesn't record: 167 adopting the day's Committee of the Whole report (one vote on all of the day's second-reading actions), 129 on bills and 58 on other motions (rulings of the chair, adjournment). They aren't included yet.
• Committee votes aren't included, and neither are voice votes, which don't record how each member voted. Vetoes the Governor returned after the session ended were put to the members by a poll by mail, not a floor roll call, and aren't included either; their outcomes are under “Bills passed” below.
• A bill's passage on third reading, including passage as amended by the other chamber, with a conference committee's report or with the Governor's proposed amendments, is a legislator's key vote. Second-reading votes, amendments and motions are used like any other roll call but aren't key votes.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 1,390 in the House and 1,601 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

• Each vote goes to the legislator who held that seat that day, and each roll call must list every member serving that day exactly once; every name on every roll call used matched exactly one legislator.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on Montana legislators, corrected where the Legislature's records differ (8 dates). In the House, Ron Marshall (District 87) resigned on March 3, 2025, and Ravalli County's commissioners appointed Terry Nelson to the seat on March 10. After the session, Marta Bertoglio (District 75), Bill Mercer (52) and Ed Stafman (59) left the House; their successors, appointed by their counties' commissioners, cast no floor votes this term.
• No legislator changed parties during the term.
• Photos are the official portraits from the Legislature's list of legislators.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President

• Each chamber is measured against the presiding officer it elects from its members, who votes like any member: Speaker Brandon Ler (District 33) and Senate President Matt Regier (District 5), each elected on January 6, 2025. Montana's Lieutenant Governor has no role in the Senate.
• 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 2,693 of 2,721 House roll calls (nay on 426); the Senate President on 2,741 of 2,782 Senate roll calls (nay on 590).
• 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 (936 in the House, 971 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 them absent or excused. The records don't say why a member didn't vote, so these pages don't say “missed”.
• “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 2 in 5 of those votes.
• Montana legislators cross party lines on party-line votes about four times as often as members of Congress: one in ten does so on at least 31.5% of them, against 7.4% in Congress, and the median legislator on 6.4%, against 1.7%. So the Montana pages use color steps four times Congress's: purple at 40% rather than 10%, then 30, 20, 12 and 6%. That keeps purple for those who cross most often: 8 of the 147 current members scored.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced in the 2025 session: 952 House bills and 564 Senate bills. Resolutions aren't laws and aren't counted.
• A bill counts for its sponsor, the legislator the Legislature lists as its sponsor; co-sponsors aren't counted.
• Passed both chambers: 545 House bills and 276 Senate bills. 778 became law, 43 were vetoed and the veto stood, and 0 went to the voters.
• 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

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

The November 3 ballot

• All 100 House seats are up, for two-year terms, and 25 of the 50 Senate seats, for four-year terms. The members elected take office when the 70th Legislature convenes in January 2027.
• The candidates are those the Secretary of State's 2026 candidate filing list showed as filed on October 22, 2026, with the party each filed with. Its site refuses automated readers, so the list was saved in a web browser; only names, parties, districts and filing dates were kept. Names are printed in capitals there: a legislator running again is shown under the name these pages use, others as the Legislature's own list spells them or in ordinary capitals.
• Three Senate candidates who filed on August 10, 2026 (in Districts 9 and 22) are listed with the party preference “NON”, which the list doesn't explain; they aren't shown here until what it means is known.
• The address lookup and the district map use the districts the Districting and Apportionment Commission adopted in 2023, first used in 2024.

Recent key votes

Each legislator's page lists their five most recent key votes, and its voting record opens with their key votes (the newest 300) until the whole record loads. A key vote is a contested or party-line roll call (both as defined above) that gave the chamber's last word on a whole bill, budgets included: its passage, agreeing to the other chamber's changes, adopting a conference committee's report or accepting the Governor's amendments, or a vote to override a veto. We read that from the motion as the record names it. Amendments, procedural motions and the adoption of resolutions aren't key votes, and neither is a motion we haven't listed. This term, 562 of the Montana House's 2,721 roll calls and 605 of the Montana Senate's 2,782 are key votes.

Next to each key vote is the bill's plain-language explanation where one has been checked against the official text (below); where there isn't one yet, the page says so rather than describe the bill another way.

Bill explanations

Montana 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 page there, where its text, history and votes 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 Montana legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every Montana 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 Montana House member voted on each floor roll call, Jan. 9, 2025 to April 22, 2025 (part 1 of 2).
• member-votes-house-2.csv: How every Montana House member voted on each floor roll call, April 23, 2025 to April 30, 2025 (part 2 of 2).
• member-votes-senate.csv: How every Montana Senate member voted on each floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every Montana bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: Montana House: current members match the chamber's own list — 100 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Montana Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 50 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Montana: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 1,516 sponsor credits on 1,516 bills
• PASS: Montana: every bill's sponsor tied to one legislator; every bill that passed both chambers law, vetoed or sent to the voters — all of them
• PASS: Montana: 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: Montana: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 150 seats
• PASS: Montana: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Montana: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Montana: every vote page's bill has its title — 5503 votes
• WARN: Montana: every current legislator has an official portrait — 3 without (initials shown): Stacy Zinn (House 52), Katie Fire Thunder (House 59), Mark Reinschmidt (House 75)
• PASS: Montana: the current term hasn't ended — through 2027-01-03
• PASS: Montana: the district map has every seat, and only those — 100 House districts, 50 Senate districts
• PASS: Montana: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Montana: every roll call is its chamber's Journal roll call on the bill that day, naming every member serving once, with the same members on each side as the data service's record or LegiScan's copy — 5,503 roll calls
• PASS: Montana: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 125 races