How the South Dakota scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from two official records that must agree. The Legislature's data service (the source of sdlegislature.gov's pages) keeps each floor vote: its tally (yeas, nays, excused, absent) and every member's vote, each tied to the member by the session's own member ID. The chamber's Journal prints the same roll call: the question, the tally, a list of names for each side, each linked to the member's record by that same ID, and the result. South Dakota's representatives and senators serve two-year terms, so this term is the Legislature that took office on January 14, 2025: 1,308 floor roll calls (658 in the House, 650 in the Senate), Jan. 14, 2025 to March 30, 2026.
  • 2025 Session: 323 House and 310 Senate roll calls, Jan. 14, 2025 to March 31, 2025.
  • 2025 Special Session: 3 House and 3 Senate roll calls, Sept. 23, 2025.
  • 2026 Session: 332 House and 337 Senate roll calls, Jan. 13, 2026 to March 30, 2026.
• 1,205 roll calls are in both records. Each data service record must add up to its tally and name every member serving in that chamber that day exactly once, and the Journal's roll call at that history step (each step of a bill's history marks its place in the Journal; 17 steps mark none, and their roll call is the one in the Journal the step names with the same measure and tally) must have the same tally and the same members on each side, member for member. The Journal's question must be the kind of motion the step records, and where the Journal says what a measure needed (“an affirmative vote of a majority” or “a two-thirds majority of the members-elect”: 36 or 47 in the House, 18 or 24 in the Senate), the result must agree with it.
• 103 roll calls only the Journals print: motions to reconsider, to place a bill on the calendar under Joint Rule 6F-6, to table, to amend, the Senate's confirmations of the Governor's appointees (31), the rules, and the chambers' elections of their officers. They're read the same way: each name by its link to the member's record, every member serving named once, the lists adding up to the tally. 75 of them are on no bill and are titled with the Journal's own words. One more roll call in the Journals, of the senators present during a call of the Senate (February 24, 2026), isn't a vote and isn't included.
• Each chamber often decides several bills on one roll call (“Shall HB 1195 and 1232 pass as amended, and HB 1155, and SB 84 pass?”): 76 roll calls here decided more than one measure, and their pages name each one.
• Two records are corrected, each with the Journal's evidence. The data service's record of SB 7 in the House (February 3, 2025) also lists Tony Venhuizen, who had resigned on January 29, as “not voting”; its own tally and the Journal's leave that entry out, and so do these pages. And on January 22, 2026 the senators tied 17 to 17 on SB 25; Lieutenant Governor Tony Venhuizen, presiding, voted yes and declared the bill passed, but the next day the Senate upheld Sen. Chris Karr's challenge to that ruling, 24 to 10, and the President declared that the Journal should show SB 25 failed: a bill needs a majority of the members elected (Constitution, Article III, Section 18). These pages show it failed.
• The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate and votes only to break a tie; those votes (3) are noted on their roll calls' pages, never counted as a senator's.
• Committee votes aren't included (20 committee votes the histories file under floor steps were set aside), and neither are votes the chambers take without a roll call, which don't record how each member voted.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 367 in the House and 284 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 is tied to its member by the session's member ID, in the data service's record and in the Journal's links alike, and each must be a member holding a seat in that chamber that day; the Journal's printed surname (with the given name where two members share one: “Jensen (Phil)”) must be that member's. Every vote on every roll call used met these checks.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on South Dakota legislators. Where it differs from the official record we follow the Journals and the Legislature's member records (6 fixes). Representative-elect Herman Otten (District 6) resigned before the term began, so one House seat was vacant until Tim Czmowski took the oath on February 18, 2025. Tony Venhuizen (District 13) resigned at 9:45 a.m. on January 29, 2025 to become Lieutenant Governor; the House Journal still lists the seat's holder as excused on that afternoon's four roll calls, and these pages follow it. Jack Kolbeck took the seat on February 6, 2025. Between the sessions, David Wheeler left the Senate on April 24, 2025 to become a judge (Brandon Wipf was appointed July 10), Chris Reder resigned from the House in May 2025 (Nick Fosness, August 5), and Representative Richard Vasgaard died on August 27, 2025 (John Shubeck, September 17).
• Peri Pourier (House District 27), elected as a Democrat, announced on September 22, 2025, the day before the special session, a switch to the Republican Party; South Dakota Searchlight confirmed the new registration with the county election office that day. Each vote is compared with the party the member belonged to that day: the 2025 session's with the Democrats, the special session's and 2026's with the Republicans. The Legislature's member records list only the current party. No other legislator changed parties during the term.
• Each build checks our current members against the Legislature's member list for the 2026 session (2026-10-23): names, districts and parties.
• Photos are the official portraits each member's record links, from their latest session, as the ledger of portrait sources records.

Votes with the Speaker or President Pro Tempore

• Each chamber's leader is a member who votes like any other: Speaker Jon Hansen (District 25), whom the House elected for the 2025-2026 term on January 14, 2025, 67 to 0, and Senate President Pro Tempore Chris Karr (District 11), whom the Senate elected for the term that day, 33 to 0. The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate as its President 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 658 of 658 House roll calls (nay on 100); the President Pro Tempore on 645 of 650 Senate roll calls (nay on 105).
• 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 (156 in the House, 136 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 Journals list members who didn't vote as excused (the chamber excused them) or absent, and both are counted here; the vote pages show which. No member abstains: South Dakota's roll calls record only yeas, nays, the excused and the absent.
• “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 half of those votes.
• South Dakota legislators break from their party on party-line votes far more often than members of Congress: one in ten breaks on at least 50.4% of them, against 7.4% in Congress, and the median legislator on 18.0%, against 1.7%; most of those votes divide the Republican majority. So the South Dakota pages use color steps five times Congress's: purple at 50% rather than 10%, then 37.5, 25, 15 and 7.5%. That keeps purple for those who cross most often: 8 of the 105 current members.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced in the term, from the Legislature's bill lists: 603 House bills and 478 Senate bills, appropriation bills and the joint resolutions that submit a constitutional amendment or a law to the voters included. Other resolutions aren't laws and aren't counted. Bill numbers start over each session: HB 1001 of 2025 and HB 1001 of 2026 are two bills.
• A bill counts for the member who introduced it, its prime sponsor in its own chamber. A bill often names a prime sponsor in the other chamber too, who carries it there (428 such names); that isn't counted. Many South Dakota bills are introduced by a committee (197 of 1,081), often at a state agency's request, and count for no one.
• Passed both chambers: delivered to the Governor or, for a measure sent to the voters, to the Secretary of State (230 House bills, 230 Senate bills). It became law when the Governor signed it, or when both chambers overrode a veto (452 laws, 0 of them over a veto). 4 were vetoed and the veto stood. 4 measures 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

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

The November 3 ballot

• All 105 seats are up, for two-year terms: each Senate district's, and each House district's two seats (one each in Districts 26A, 26B, 28A and 28B). The members elected take office on January 12, 2027.
• The candidates are the Secretary of State's 2026 General Election Candidate List as of 2026-10-22 (162 legislative candidates: 111 for the House, 51 for the Senate), each party's nominees and independent candidates. The list also gives candidates' mailing addresses; only names, parties and districts were kept.
• The address lookup and the district map use the districts the Legislature drew in 2021, the ones this Legislature was elected from and the November 3 election uses.

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, 319 of the South Dakota House's 658 roll calls and 238 of the South Dakota Senate's 650 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

South Dakota vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the bill's title as the Legislature lists it, and the page links to the bill's page on sdlegislature.gov, 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 South Dakota legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every South Dakota 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 Dakota legislator voted on every floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every South Dakota bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: South Dakota House: current members match the chamber's own list — 70 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: South Dakota Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 35 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: South Dakota: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 884 sponsor credits on 884 bills
• PASS: South Dakota: every bill both chambers passed signed, vetoed or law without a signature, as its history has it; every joint resolution both chambers adopted sent to the voters; members' bills credited to their prime sponsors — all of them
• PASS: South Dakota: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: South Dakota: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 72 seats
• PASS: South Dakota: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: South Dakota: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: South Dakota: every vote page's bill has its title — 1308 votes
• PASS: South Dakota: every current legislator has an official portrait — 109 portraits
• PASS: South Dakota: the current term hasn't ended — through 2027-01-11
• PASS: South Dakota: the district map has every seat, and only those — 37 House districts, 35 Senate districts
• PASS: South Dakota: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: South Dakota: every roll call in the Legislature's data service adds up to its tally, names every member serving that day once, each tied by member ID to the member holding a seat, and matches the roll call its chamber's Journal prints member for member; every Journal roll call is one of them or read from the Journal the same way — 1,308 roll calls (1,205 matched to the Journal, 103 from the Journals only)
• PASS: South Dakota: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 72 races