How the New Mexico scores work

The vote records

• This term is the 57th Legislature, which took office on January 1, 2025: 986 floor roll calls (483 in the House, 503 in the Senate), Jan. 21, 2025 to Feb. 19, 2026.
  • 2025 Regular Session: 342 House and 339 Senate roll calls, Jan. 21, 2025 to March 22, 2025.
  • 2025 First Special Session: 8 House and 8 Senate roll calls, Oct. 1, 2025 to Oct. 2, 2025.
  • 2025 Second Special Session: 1 House and 1 Senate roll call, Nov. 10, 2025.
  • 2026 Regular Session: 132 House and 155 Senate roll calls, Jan. 21, 2026 to Feb. 19, 2026.
• Each roll call has two records at the Legislature. The official roll call, certified by the presiding officer and the Chief Clerk, names every member serving with their vote (the House's: yea, nay, present not voting, excused or absent; the Senate's: yes, no, absent, excused or recused). The Journal's record of it, in the Legislature's bill database for each session, gives its number, day, question and result, and names the members on every side but one, which it prints as a count.
• Where both records hold a roll call (671), they must agree on the number, day, measure and counts, and on every member the Journal names. Where only the Journal does (181), the roll call is built from it: the members it names, and on the side it prints as a count, the members serving that day it doesn't name, who must number that count. Where only the official roll call does (134, nearly all the 2026 House's, whose Journal records aren't in the database), it must agree with the tally in its measure's history.
• Every official roll call must name every member serving in its chamber that day once, and its marks must add up to its printed counts. The Legislature's site keeps one file per measure and chamber, and a later roll call on a measure takes the earlier one's place, so the files hold only some roll calls; the Journal's records fill in the rest of 2025's and the 2026 Senate's.
• Where the two records disagree, the Journal's record is corrected only where the official roll call settles it and the measure's history doesn't contradict it: HB 66, Feb. 19, 2025: the Journal's record leaves Rep. Mark Murphy out of every list; the roll call marks him absent; roll call 329, March 18, 2025: the Journal's record names SB 120; the roll call and HB 120's history (passed by the House that day, 60 to 3) say HB 120; roll call 421, March 22, 2025: the Journal's record names HB 315; the roll call and SB 315's history (passed by the House that day, 63 to 0) say SB 315.
• The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate and votes only to break a tie. The Journal shows that vote twice: on an amendment to SB 235 (2026) the senators split evenly and the Lieutenant Governor's no defeated it, and on Senate Memorial 19 (2025) the Lieutenant Governor is shown voting yes. Only senators' votes are counted here; each page says so.
• The House sometimes passes several memorials on one roll call (3 roll calls); each is shown once, with its memorials listed. The Senate's 62 roll calls confirming the Governor's appointees are included. Attendance roll calls, committee votes and voice votes aren't. Nor are the House's election of its Speaker (43 to 26) and the Senate's of its President Pro Tempore (26 to 16) on January 21, 2025: the Journal records their tallies but not how each member voted, and neither has an official roll call posted.
• 273 roll call numbers are in neither record. 233 fall where a day's numbering begins, where the Journal records each day's attendance roll call without a number; 40 fall between a day's votes (2025 Regular Session New Mexico House: 2, 2025 Regular Session New Mexico Senate: 13, 2025 First Special Session New Mexico Senate: 1, 2026 Regular Session New Mexico House: 20, 2026 Regular Session New Mexico Senate: 4), and those roll calls can't be shown.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 192 in the House and 180 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 initials where two share one (“Martinez, A.”, “JF Hernandez”). Each name goes to the one legislator holding a seat in that chamber that day with that name, through the Legislature's own list of its members' names and initials. Every name on every roll call used matched exactly one legislator.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on New Mexico legislators. Where it differs from the official record, we follow the Senate Republican caucus's and the Governor's announcements and news reports (5 dates). In the House, Martha Garcia took the District 6 seat on February 27, 2025; it had been vacant since the term began. Joanne Ferrary (District 37) and Susan Herrera (District 41) retired on July 27, 2026, and Andrea Reeb (District 64) resigned on October 15, 2026. The Legislature lists Yolanda Jaramillo in Susan Herrera's seat; the day she took office isn't published, so these pages don't state it. In the Senate, Nicholas Paul (District 33) resigned on October 14, 2025, and the Governor appointed Rex Wilson to the seat on January 8, 2026. No roll call fell between a departure and the successor's first day except the Second Special Session's, which the Senate held with District 33 vacant.
• No legislator changed parties during the term.
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and Senate's lists of their members of 2026-10-22, names, districts and parties.
• Photos are the official portraits the Legislature posts for each member, under the member's own code, so a former member's portrait is still their own. The site no longer posts Joanne Ferrary's, Susan Herrera's or Andrea Reeb's; theirs are the Internet Archive's copies of those same files, saved while they served.

Votes with the Speaker or President Pro Tempore

• Speaker Javier Martínez (District 11), Speaker since 2023, leads the House. The Senate is measured against its President Pro Tempore, Mimi Stewart (District 17), in that office since 2021, a senator the Senate elects to lead it. Both were chosen again on January 21, 2025, and both vote like any member. The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate but isn't a senator.
• 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 453 of 483 House roll calls (nay on 0); the President Pro Tempore on 469 of 503 Senate roll calls (nay on 62).
• 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 (146 in the House, 139 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 they didn't vote yea or nay. The records say whether a member was excused, absent, or (in the House) present but not voting or (in the Senate) recused; each vote page lists them apart.
• “In office” means the member held a seat that day: each official roll call 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.
• New Mexico legislators break from their party on party-line votes more often than members of Congress: one in ten breaks on at least 11.5% of them, against 7.4% in Congress, and the median legislator on 3.0%, against 1.7%. So the New Mexico pages use the color steps of Nevada and Connecticut, twice Congress's: purple at 20% rather than 10%, then 15, 10, 6 and 3%. That keeps purple for those who cross most often.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced in the term's sessions, from the Legislature's bill database: 1,036 House bills and 895 Senate bills, the General Appropriation Act and the joint resolutions proposing amendments to the Constitution of New Mexico included. Memorials, other joint resolutions and resolutions aren't laws and aren't counted.
• A bill counts for its sponsor, the legislator the Legislature lists first on it, a member of the chamber where it was introduced. Co-sponsors aren't counted.
• Passed both chambers: 154 House bills and 125 Senate bills. A bill became law when the Governor signed it, signed it with line items vetoed (10, appropriation bills), or didn't act on it in time while the Legislature sat (1): 237 laws. 38 were vetoed, 18 of them by a pocket veto (not signed within 20 days after the session ended); the House voted to override one veto, on HB 65 (2025), and the Senate didn't, so it stood. 4 proposed constitutional amendments went to the voters. Each regular session's laws, vetoes and pocket vetoes agree, chamber by chamber, with the session statistics in the Legislature's database.
• 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

• These pages don't credit budget items to New Mexico legislators.

The November 3 ballot

• All 70 House seats are up, for two-year terms. Senate District 33 is up for the last two years of its term, since its senator was appointed; the other 41 senators were elected in 2024 to four-year terms. The members elected take office on January 1, 2027.
• The candidates come from the Secretary of State's 2026 General Election candidate list, and only names, parties and offices are kept from it. Until it's on these pages, the ballot page lists every seat on the ballot and who holds it now, and links to the Secretary of State's page; it names no candidate from any other source.
• The address lookup and the district map use the districts the Legislature drew in 2021, the ones the members elected in 2022 and 2024 represent.

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, 141 of the New Mexico House's 483 roll calls and 114 of the New Mexico Senate's 503 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

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

Checks

• PASS: New Mexico House: current members match the chamber's own list — 68 members and 2 vacant seats agree
• PASS: New Mexico Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 42 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: New Mexico: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 1,931 sponsor credits on 1,931 bills
• PASS: New Mexico: every bill's sponsor tied to one legislator of its chamber; every bill that passed both chambers law, vetoed, pocket vetoed or sent to the voters; the regular sessions' counts agree with the Legislature's session statistics — all of them
• PASS: New Mexico: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: New Mexico: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 112 seats
• PASS: New Mexico: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: New Mexico: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: New Mexico: every vote page's bill has its title — 986 votes
• PASS: New Mexico: every current legislator has an official portrait — 114 portraits
• PASS: New Mexico: the current term hasn't ended — through 2026-12-31
• PASS: New Mexico: the district map has every seat, and only those — 70 House districts, 42 Senate districts
• PASS: New Mexico: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: New Mexico: every official roll call names every member serving that day once, each tied to the one member holding a seat, and adds up to its printed counts; every Journal record agrees with it member for member — 986 roll calls: 671 in both records, 181 in the Journal only, 134 official records only
• WARN: New Mexico: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — the state's candidate list isn't in place yet: the election page lists the 71 seats on the ballot and links to the state's candidate database