How the New Jersey scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the Legislature's own records, published by its Office of Legislative Services: each bill's page on njleg.gov lists its floor roll calls with their tallies and every member's vote, and the Legislature's vote files for download list every member's vote on every floor roll call of the year. We use every General Assembly and Senate floor roll call of the 2026–27 session so far, 464 roll calls (250 in the Assembly, 214 in the Senate), Feb. 5, 2026 to Sept. 24, 2026.
• A roll call is used only if its members' votes add up to the tally the bill's page prints, it lists every member serving that day exactly once, and the vote files show the same members voting the same way on that bill, day and motion. All of them did.
• Committee votes aren't included. Neither are voice votes (most substitutions of one house's bill for the other's are voice votes), which don't record how each member voted.
• New Jersey passes a bill with a majority of all members (41 in the Assembly, 21 in the Senate), not a majority of those voting, so a member who doesn't vote has the same effect on passage as one who votes no.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yes and no votes: 79 in the Assembly and 74 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 each member as the Legislature's member biographies do (“Coughlin, Craig J.”). Each name goes to the member's number in the Legislature's roster, and that number to the legislator in Open States' data, which links each one to their roster page. Every name on every roll call matched exactly one legislator in office that day.
• Each of New Jersey's 40 districts elects one senator and two Assembly members, so each district has two Assembly members on these pages.
• Names, terms and contact details come from Open States. Where it differs from the Legislature's own records, we follow those: the twelve Assembly members the 2025 election replaced served until the new Legislature convened on January 13, 2026, not January 24 as Open States has it.
• Each build checks our current members against the Legislature's own roster, names and parties. Committee assignments are the Legislature's own, from the same database.
• Photos are the official portraits from the members' biographies on njleg.gov. A member without one shows initials.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President

• New Jersey's presiding officers vote like any member: the Speaker of the General Assembly, Craig Coughlin (District 19), and the President of the Senate, Nick Scutari (District 22). Each chamber elects its own; the Lieutenant Governor doesn't preside over the Senate.
• 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 Speaker voted on 249 of 250 Assembly roll calls; the Senate President on 214 of 214 Senate roll calls.
• New Jersey's leaders decide which bills reach the floor, and they vote for them: the Speaker voted no on 0 roll calls and the Senate President on 0. So this score mostly shows how often a member votes yes on what their chamber's leadership brought to a vote, including motions to table the minority party's motions.
• 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 (71 in the Assembly, 57 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 as “Not Voting.” New Jersey's records don't say why: a member who was absent and a member who was there and didn't vote are recorded alike, so this share counts both.
• Because a bill needs a majority of all members, not voting has the same effect on passage as voting no, and legislators sometimes don't vote on a bill rather than vote against it. Read a high share with that in mind: it isn't only absence.
• An abstention (“Abstain”) is a vote, recorded apart from yes and no: it isn't counted here as not voting, and it doesn't count toward the leader or party scores.
• “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.
• Most New Jersey legislators never break from their party on party-line votes (the median is 0%, against 1.7% in Congress), but those who do break more often than members of Congress: one in ten breaks on at least 10.9% of them, against 7.4% in Congress. So, as on the Florida pages, each color step starts at twice Congress's level: purple at 20% rather than 10%, then 15, 10, 6 and 3%. That keeps purple for the few who cross most often.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced this session, from the Legislature's database: 5,591 Assembly bills and 4,806 Senate bills. Joint, concurrent and one-house resolutions aren't counted.
• A bill counts for its prime sponsors, as the Legislature lists them ("Primary Sponsor"); co-sponsors and sponsors who withdrew aren't counted. A bill can have several prime sponsors, and each one is credited.
• Bills usually move with an identical bill in the other house, and one is substituted for the other on the floor, so only one of the pair passes both houses and it carries the other house's prime sponsors with it. Each member is credited once: a prime sponsor of the bill that wasn't passed is credited through the one that was ("passed as A4071"; 105 credits this session), and the passed bill credits the other house's prime sponsors only when they aren't.
• Passed both houses: the bill's history records it (53 Assembly bills and 51 Senate bills so far). It became law when the Governor approved it (98 laws, P.L.2026, chapters 1 to 98, each on exactly one bill), and didn't when the Governor vetoed it outright or returned it with a conditional veto (3). 3 that passed both houses were still awaiting the Governor's action.
• New Jersey's constitution bars private, special and local laws on most subjects, and the Legislature doesn't mark bills local, so every bill counts the same way. The ranked number is bills that passed both houses.
• 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 this session had less time to pass bills.

Budget projects

• New Jersey's budget, the annual Appropriations Act, doesn't say which legislator asked for an item, so there's no budget figure for New Jersey legislators.

The November 3 ballot

• No seat in the New Jersey Legislature is on the November 3, 2026 ballot. New Jersey elects its Legislature in odd-numbered years: all 80 Assembly members were elected on November 4, 2025, and all 40 Senate seats and all 80 Assembly seats are next on the ballot on November 2, 2027.
• New Jersey voters do elect a U.S. senator and their members of the U.S. House on November 3: the ballot guide for Congress lists those races.

Bill explanations

Vote pages can carry a one- or two-sentence explanation of what the bill does. Each is written with AI and published only after these steps:

• It is drafted only from official text: the Legislature's statements on the version of the bill the chamber voted on, as it publishes them with the bill: the last statement a committee filed when it reported the bill before the vote (or, if none had, the sponsor's statement printed with the bill as introduced), then the statements on any floor amendments adopted after it. A committee statement's notes on the committee's amendments and on the bill's cost are left out. The page shows that text in full beside the explanation.
• Automatic rules reject a draft that judges the bill, names a party or politician, says whether the bill passed (the page shows that from the record), runs past two sentences, or uses any number that isn't in the official text. The English and Spanish must give the same numbers.
• A separate AI review, which sees only the official text and the draft, checks every statement against the text. A draft with any statement the text doesn't support, or that overstates it (“requires” where the text says “allows”), is rejected.
• If the official text later changes, the explanation stops showing until it is redrafted from the new text.

An explanation describes the bill, not the particular motion voted on (an amendment, say). Bills without enough official text to explain, and Georgia roll calls on many local bills at once, have none. A New Jersey roll call whose version of the bill can't be tied to its statements has none: a version with no statement, or a statement from the day of the vote that the bill's history doesn't place before or after it.

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

Checks

• PASS: New Jersey House: current members match the chamber's own list — 80 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: New Jersey Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 40 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: New Jersey: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 15,898 sponsor credits on 10,370 bills
• PASS: New Jersey: every bill's prime sponsors tied to one legislator, every passed bill's outcome known — all of them
• PASS: New Jersey: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: New Jersey: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 80 seats
• PASS: New Jersey: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: New Jersey: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 164 vote pages show one
• PASS: New Jersey: every vote page's bill has its title — 464 votes
• PASS: New Jersey: every current legislator has an official portrait — 120 portraits
• PASS: New Jersey: the district map has every seat, and only those — 40 House districts, 40 Senate districts
• PASS: New Jersey: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: New Jersey: every roll call adds up to its printed tally, names every member serving once, and matches the Legislature's vote files — all of them
• PASS: New Jersey: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 0 races