How the South Carolina scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the Legislature's own records on scstatehouse.gov: each chamber's Vote History for the 126th General Assembly, which lists every roll call with its counts and result, and each roll call's record, which names every member under how they voted. We use every House and Senate floor roll call of the 2025–2026 term, 2,282 roll calls (1,372 in the House, 910 in the Senate), Dec. 3, 2024 to Aug. 25, 2026. The 2026 session adjourned in May and met again in June and August to finish its business; House members' terms end after the November 3 election.
• A roll call is used only if its record agrees with the Vote History list (its number, day, time, result and counts), its members add up to those counts, and it lists every member serving that day exactly once. All of them did.
• As a check from a second source, each build compares every roll call with the House and Senate Journals, the chambers' official record of each day, which print the yeas and nays of every roll call; the result is under Checks. Each build also compares the yeas and nays each bill's history prints; where they differ, the Journal, wherever it prints the vote, agrees with the roll call.
• The Vote History doesn't list every roll call the Journals record. At least 18 floor roll calls appear only in the Journals, most of them in the Senate, including five on the congressional redistricting bill (H. 5683) on May 23, 2026. These pages are built from the Vote History's records, which name how each member voted, so they don't include those roll calls; they're listed under Who cast each vote.
• We leave out roll calls that aren't a vote on a question: attendance and quorum calls; elections between candidates (the House's election of its Speaker and of its Ethics Committee members on December 3, 2024, and two Senate votes on judicial candidates on February 5, 2025); the roll calls of the Joint Assembly, where both chambers meet together to elect judges, university trustees and commissioners; and one Senate roll call no one voted on (No. 748, April 23, 2026, recorded as “Pending”).
• The Senate's votes to confirm the Governor's appointments are included, and so are the House's votes on the appointments that need its consent (masters-in-equity and members of the State Ethics Commission, for example). Each vote page names the appointee and the office.
• Both chambers voted on the budget section by section; each section's roll call has its own page.
• Committee votes aren't included. Neither are voice votes, which don't record how each member voted.
• The records print whether each question carried (“Passed”, “Failed”, “Confirmed”), and the vote pages show it. 70 House and 38 Senate roll calls failed.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 523 in the House and 148 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 print each member by name, surname first (“Smith, G. Murrell, Jr.”), not by number. Open States' data on South Carolina legislators records the same forms of each name, so each name goes to the one legislator who held a seat in that chamber on that day and has that name; a name that fit no one, or more than one, would stop the roll call. Every name on every roll call matched, and each printed name went to the same legislator all term.
• Names and terms come from Open States. Where its dates differ from the Legislature's own records, we follow those: the resignation letters the House Journal prints for Representatives Will Wheeler (January 17, 2025), R.J. May (August 2025) and Bobby Cox (effective January 5, 2026); Senator Lee Bright's oath on January 13, 2026, in the Senate Journal; and Senator Roger Nutt's resignation, effective January 5, 2026, as news reports of his letter give it.
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and the Senate's own member lists, names and parties.
• The Legislature's site asks automated readers not to download its images, so these pages show each member's initials rather than a portrait.
• Roll calls only in the Journals, not included (yeas–nays): South Carolina House, Feb. 3, 2026, 107–0; South Carolina Senate, March 19, 2025, 41–0; South Carolina Senate, March 19, 2025, 41–0; South Carolina Senate, April 16, 2025, 35–0; South Carolina Senate, April 16, 2025, 40–0; South Carolina Senate, May 8, 2025, 43–0; South Carolina Senate, May 8, 2025, 43–0; South Carolina Senate, March 3, 2026, 29–0; South Carolina Senate, May 14, 2026, 39–0; South Carolina Senate, May 14, 2026, 39–0; South Carolina Senate, May 14, 2026, 40–0; South Carolina Senate, May 14, 2026, 40–0; South Carolina Senate, May 23, 2026, 28–15; South Carolina Senate, May 23, 2026, 26–18; South Carolina Senate, May 23, 2026, 34–9; South Carolina Senate, May 23, 2026, 26–18; South Carolina Senate, May 23, 2026, 27–17; South Carolina Senate, Aug. 25, 2026, 30–6.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President

• South Carolina's presiding officers vote like any member: the Speaker of the House, Murrell Smith (District 67), re-elected Speaker on December 3, 2024, and the President of the Senate, Tom Alexander (District 1), a senator the Senate elected its President in 2021. Each held the office for every roll call here. Since 2019 the Senate elects its President from among its members; the Lieutenant Governor no longer presides.
• 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 1,157 of 1,372 House roll calls (nay on 55); the Senate President on 908 of 910 Senate roll calls (nay on 33).
• 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 (319 in the House, 91 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.
• The records mark a member who didn't vote either “Excused Absence”, an absence the chamber excused, or “Not Voting”. The Senate's records don't print the names of senators marked “Not Voting”: they're the senators serving that day whom the record doesn't name, and on every Senate roll call their number matched the count the Vote History prints.
• A member can also abstain, which the records print as “Abstain” (members recuse themselves where a vote could affect an economic interest of theirs or of a person or business they're associated with, as state ethics law requires: Code Sections 8-13-700 and 8-13-745) or, in the Senate, “Present”. These pages count both as abstaining: a vote cast, on neither side, so it isn't a missed vote and isn't compared with the leader or the party.
• “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.
• South Carolina legislators break from their party on party-line votes more often than members of Congress (one in ten breaks on at least 14.3% of them, against 7.4% in Congress), about as often as Florida's and Georgia's, so the South Carolina pages use the same color steps as those states, twice Congress's: purple at 20% rather than 10%, then 15, 10, 6 and 3%. That keeps purple for the truly moderate. Senators break far more often than House members: the typical senator on 10.6% of party-line votes, the typical House member on 2%.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill and joint resolution introduced this term, from the Legislature's bill records: 1,560 in the House and 727 in the Senate, the budget bills included. Joint resolutions count because, like bills, they go to the Governor and can become law. Concurrent resolutions and each chamber's own resolutions aren't counted.
• A bill counts for its prime sponsor, the first name on it, whom the Legislature's records link to the member's page. Co-sponsors aren't counted. A bill a committee sponsored (68 of them: most approve agencies' regulations, and the House Ways and Means Committee sponsors the budget bills) counts for no one.
• Passed both chambers: the bill was ratified, the step after both chambers pass it and before it goes to the Governor (153 House bills, 124 Senate bills). It became law when the Governor signed it, it took effect without his signature, or both chambers overrode his veto, and it has an Act number; it didn't if he vetoed it and the veto stood (3). Each build checks the Acts against the Legislature's own lists of the Acts of 2025 and 2026, Act for Act.
• South Carolina doesn't mark local bills apart (a bill for one county is a general bill like any other), 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

• The South Carolina pages don't credit legislators with budget items.

The November 3 ballot

• All 124 House seats are on the ballot. No Senate seat is: senators serve four-year terms, and all 46 were elected on November 5, 2024.
• The candidates are the State Election Commission's, from its Candidate Tracking, read Oct. 17, 2026: everyone it lists as active for the House on the general-election ballot. Candidates defeated in the June primaries, or who withdrew, aren't listed. A race with a single candidate is marked unopposed; South Carolina's ballot still has a line for a write-in.

Bill explanations

South Carolina vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the bill's short summary as the Legislature prints it beside the roll call, and the page links to the bill on scstatehouse.gov, where its full text, history and fiscal impact statement 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 South Carolina legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every South Carolina 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 South Carolina legislator voted on every floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every South Carolina bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: South Carolina House: current members match the chamber's own list — 124 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: South Carolina Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 46 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: South Carolina: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 2,219 sponsor credits on 2,219 bills
• PASS: South Carolina: every bill's prime sponsor matched to one legislator, every Act on the Acts lists — all of them
• PASS: South Carolina: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: South Carolina: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 170 seats
• PASS: South Carolina: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: South Carolina: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: South Carolina: every vote page's bill has its title — 2282 votes
• WARN: South Carolina: every current legislator has an official portrait — 170 without (initials shown): Bill Whitmire (House 1), Adam Duncan (House 2), Phillip Bowers (House 3), Davey Hiott (House 4), Neal Collins (House 5), April Cromer (House 6)
• PASS: South Carolina: the district map has every seat, and only those — 124 House districts, 46 Senate districts
• PASS: South Carolina: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: South Carolina: every roll call's names add up to its printed counts, agree with the Vote History list and name every member serving once — all of them
• PASS: South Carolina: the House and Senate Journals print every roll call used, with the same yeas and nays — 2,278 of 2,282; not found: 2025-senate-0361-h3632, 2025-senate-0390-h4247, 2025-senate-0774, 2025-senate-0851-h5179
• WARN: South Carolina: every floor roll call the Journals record is on the Vote History list — 18 in a Journal only, left out: House 2026-02-03 107-0; Senate 2025-03-19 41-0; Senate 2025-03-19 41-0; Senate 2025-04-16 35-0; Senate 2025-04-16 40-0; Senate 2025-05-08 43-0; Senate 2025-05-08 43-0; Senate 2026-03-03 29-0; Senate 2026-05-14 39-0; Senate 2026-05-14 39-0; Senate 2026-05-14 40-0; Senate 2026-05-14 40-0; Senate 2026-05-23 28-15; Senate 2026-05-23 26-18; Senate 2026-05-23 34-9; Senate 2026-05-23 26-18; Senate 2026-05-23 27-17; Senate 2026-08-25 30-6
• PASS: South Carolina: bill roll calls' yeas and nays agree with the tallies the bills' histories print — 928 of 938 agree; the roll call is followed for H 3196 2025-02-12 (House: history 109-0, roll call 111-0); H 3292 2025-05-06 (Senate: history 44-0, no roll call); H 3768 2026-05-13 (Senate: history 38-2, no roll call); H 3798 2026-02-18 (Senate: history 30-13, no roll call); H 3858 2026-03-05 (Senate: history 39-1, no roll call); H 4157 2025-04-10 (House: history 92-0, no roll call)
• PASS: South Carolina: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 124 races