How the Ohio scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the House and Senate Journals, each chamber's official record of its proceedings, one for each day it meets, which the General Assembly publishes on legislature.ohio.gov. Each roll call is printed the same way: the question, the yeas and nays, and every member who voted yea and every member who voted nay, by name. We use every House and Senate floor roll call of the 136th General Assembly, 715 roll calls (376 in the House, 339 in the Senate), Jan. 6, 2025 to Sept. 30, 2026. The General Assembly is still meeting, so the pages are refreshed as the Journals are posted.
• A roll call is used only if the names under “yeas” and under “nays” number exactly what the Journal prints, every name is the one member of that chamber serving that day with that name, and no one is named twice. All of them did.
• As a check from a second source, the General Assembly's legislative data service lists, for each bill, the floor votes on its passage, on agreeing to the other chamber's amendments, on conference reports and on veto overrides, with each member's vote by the General Assembly's own member number. Each of those must be a Journal roll call with the same members voting yea and nay: 552 of 552 are. The Journals' other 163 roll calls (amendments, motions to table, resolutions, confirmations and the like) aren't in that service; they're checked against their printed counts.
• Each roll call is on the bill the Journal says was before the chamber: one taken up for consideration, printed for its third consideration, or named in the question. A roll call whose bill couldn't be told that way would be left out; none was.
• We leave out roll calls that aren't votes of the chamber: when a seat falls vacant, the members of the departing member's party alone elect a successor by resolution (Ohio Constitution, Article II, Section 11), and the Journal prints that roll call too. Left out (4): Jane M. Timken (Ohio Senate, Jan. 29, 2025, 22–0); Ty Moore (Ohio House, June 18, 2025, 61–0); Ashley Bryant Bailey (Ohio House, Oct. 1, 2025, 32–0); Sean M. Hutson (Ohio House, Sept. 30, 2026, 62–0).
• The chambers' elections of their officers on January 6, 2025 are included: each was a yes-or-no question on one nominee (“Shall Senator Rob McColley be elected President?”). So are the Senate's votes to confirm appointments; each vote page says whose.
• Committee votes aren't included. Neither are votes taken without a roll call, which don't record how each member voted.
• The Journal prints whether each question carried (“The bill passed.”, “The motion to amend was laid on the table.”), and the vote pages show it. 4 House and 2 Senate roll calls failed. A bill with an emergency clause takes effect at once only if two-thirds of the members of each chamber keep the clause and pass the bill as an emergency measure, so a question can fail with more yeas than nays. On 1 roll call the Journal goes on without saying whether the question carried; the page shows no result.
• Where the Journal's printed question isn't what was voted on, we follow the rest of the record and say so: on October 22, 2025, after an amendment to S.B. 156 was laid on the table, the Senate Journal prints “The question recurred, ‘Shall the title be agreed to?’” and then the 24–9 roll call and “So the bill passed.” The question pending was the bill's, put on the same page, and the data service lists the Senate's passage of S.B. 156 that day with the same 24 yeas and 9 nays, member for member, so that roll call is shown as passage.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 119 in the House and 88 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 an initial where two members of the chamber share it (“Hall, T.”), and the presiding officer last. Each name goes to the one legislator who held a seat in that chamber on that day with that name; a name that fit no one, or more than one, would stop the roll call. Every name on every roll call matched.
• Names and terms come from Open States, each legislator tied to the General Assembly's own member record (its member number and the surname its records print: “Robb Blasdel”). Where Open States' dates differ from the Journals, we follow the Journals, which print each resignation: Representative Don Jones's took effect at 11:59 p.m. on June 1, 2025; Representative Sedrick Denson's on August 8, 2025; Senator Nathan Manning's on August 2, 2026; and Representative D.J. Swearingen's on October 4, 2026. A member elected to a vacant seat serves from the oath the Journal records (Senator Jane Timken on January 29, 2025; Representatives Ty Moore on June 18, 2025, Ashley Bryant Bailey on October 1, 2025, and Sean Hutson on September 30, 2026).
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and the Senate's own member directories, names and parties, vacant seats included (House District 89 and Senate District 13 are vacant now).
• Portraits are the official ones from the House's and the Senate's member directories.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President

• Ohio's presiding officers vote like any member, and the Journals print each one's name last whenever they vote: the Speaker of the House, Matt Huffman (District 78), and the President of the Senate, Rob McColley (District 1), a senator the Senate elects; the Lieutenant Governor doesn't preside. Both were elected on January 6, 2025 and held the office for every roll call here.
• 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 376 of 376 House roll calls (nay on 2); the Senate President on 325 of 339 Senate roll calls (nay on 2).
• 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 (103 in the House, 82 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 Journal doesn't show them voting yea or nay.
• The Journals print only the members who voted yea and nay; a member serving that day who isn't named didn't vote. Both chambers excuse their absent members as a group, by a motion each week (“so long as a written explanation is on file with the Clerk”), so the Journals don't say who was excused from which roll call, and these pages say “didn't vote”, never “missed” or “excused”.
• One exception: a member the chamber excused from a single vote because it might be construed that they have an interest in the legislation (House and Senate Rule 59) is shown as excused from voting on that roll call. That happened 6 times this term. It still counts as not voting.
• The Journals record no abstentions.
• “In office” means from the day a member's service began (the oath the Journal records, for a member elected to a vacant seat) to the day it ended.

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.
• Ohio legislators break from their party on party-line votes more often than members of Congress (one in ten breaks on at least 10.9% of them, against 7.4% in Congress), about as often as Pennsylvania's, so the Ohio pages use the same color steps as Pennsylvania, twice Congress's: purple at 20% rather than 10%, then 15, 10, 6 and 3%. That keeps purple for the truly moderate. House members break far more often than senators: one House member in ten on at least 17.6% of party-line votes, one senator in ten on at least 3.7%.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every House and Senate bill introduced this term, from the General Assembly's records: 1,024 in the House and 479 in the Senate, the budget bills included. Joint resolutions propose amendments to the Ohio Constitution, which go to the voters rather than the Governor, so they aren't counted; neither are concurrent resolutions or each chamber's own resolutions.
• A bill counts for its primary sponsors, as the General Assembly lists them by member number (a bill can have two). Co-sponsors aren't counted.
• Passed both chambers: the bill was sent to the Governor (62 House bills, 42 Senate bills). Each build checks that the Journals record its passage in both chambers, and that these are exactly the bills on the General Assembly's own list of the session's acts (every bill it sent to the Governor, the vetoed ones included), act for act. It became law when the Governor signed it, it took effect without his signature, or both chambers passed it over his veto (101). An item veto in an appropriation bill doesn't make the bill vetoed. Vetoed, the veto standing so far: 3 (the General Assembly can vote to override a veto until its term ends).
• Ohio 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.

Budget projects

• Ohio's budget acts don't name the legislator who asked for an item, so there's no budget figure for Ohio legislators.

The November 3 ballot

• All 99 House seats are on the ballot, and so are the 17 odd-numbered Senate seats: senators serve four-year terms, and the even-numbered seats were elected in 2024.
• The candidates are the ones the Secretary of State's election-night results site (Ohio Decides 2026) lists for each House and Senate race, read Oct. 18, 2026. The site is set up for the November 3 election ahead of time; the vote totals it shows before then come from the office's mock elections and aren't used. A candidate the site lists without a party is an independent candidate. A certified write-in candidate isn't named here: the race says the ballot has a write-in line. The site turns away automated readers, so the list was read by hand in a browser.

Bill explanations

Ohio vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the bill's short title as the General Assembly lists it, and the page links to the bill on legislature.ohio.gov, where its text, the Legislative Service Commission's analysis and its fiscal notes 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 Ohio legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every Ohio 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 Ohio legislator voted on every floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every Ohio bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: Ohio House: current members match the chamber's own list — 98 members and 1 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Ohio Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 32 members and 1 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Ohio: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 2,306 sponsor credits on 1,503 bills
• PASS: Ohio: every bill's primary sponsors tied to legislators by member ID, every bill sent to the Governor passed by both chambers in the Journals and on the list of acts — all of them
• PASS: Ohio: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Ohio: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 132 seats
• PASS: Ohio: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Ohio: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Ohio: every vote page's bill has its title — 715 votes
• PASS: Ohio: every current legislator has an official portrait — 133 portraits
• PASS: Ohio: the district map has every seat, and only those — 99 House districts, 33 Senate districts
• PASS: Ohio: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Ohio: every Journal roll call's names add up to its printed yeas and nays and each is one member serving that day — all of them
• PASS: Ohio: the data service's floor votes (by member ID) match the Journals' roll calls, member for member — 552 of 552 agree; the Journals' other 163 roll calls (amendments, motions, resolutions, confirmations) the service doesn't list
• PASS: Ohio: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 116 races