How the Tennessee scores work

The vote records

• The General Assembly publishes each bill's floor and committee votes on the bill's page on its site, with the counts and every member who voted aye, no or “present and not voting” by name. Its site asks automated readers other than search engines and archives to stay away, so Capitol Lens doesn't read those pages itself. Open States, a nonpartisan project that collects every state legislature's records, reads them and publishes what they say in the public domain; its files for the 114th General Assembly are our source for the votes and the bills. We use 6,018 floor roll calls (1,473 in the House, 4,545 in the Senate), Jan. 15, 2025 to April 23, 2026.
• These are the Regular Session's roll calls (January 14 to April 22, 2025 and January 13 to April 24, 2026). The two extraordinary sessions aren't included yet: Open States' files have the January 27–31, 2025 session's counts but not who voted which way (that session passed the education savings account and immigration enforcement laws), and nothing from the May 5–7, 2026 session, which redrew the state's congressional districts.
• The House votes on its consent calendar, a list of bills and resolutions no one objected to, with one roll call, and each bill's page repeats it. We keep each consent calendar once (70 roll calls, not 3,182 copies), and only if every bill's copy names the same members the same way. A copy whose page lost the names counts toward the calendar only if its counts are the others'.
• A roll call is used only if its names add up to the counts the record prints and each name is one member serving in that chamber that day. The records don't print roll-call numbers or times, so where a chamber took two votes of the same kind on a bill in a day, the pages tell them apart by their tallies, not by order.
• Left out: committee votes (7,589), 3 committee votes the pages mark as floor votes (fewer members than the two-thirds of the chamber a floor vote needs), 5 records that don't say what was voted on, and 94 votes of other sessions that Open States attached to a bill with the same number (“HB 301” of 2007).
• As a check from a second source, each build compares every vote on passage, adoption or concurrence with the tally the bill's history prints, which the clerks type. 5,350 of 5,470 agree; 25 differ only in the members present and not voting, and 95 by a vote or two, as when a member asks afterward to be recorded. Where they differ, we follow the roll call.
• Voice votes aren't included: they 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: 709 in the House and 334 in the Senate. Most of the Senate's roll calls adopt resolutions honoring people and places, nearly all unanimous. 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 a first initial where two share it (“Hicks G”, “Jones J”), and the presiding officer as “Mr. Speaker”. Each name goes to the one member of that chamber who held a seat that day. Open States ties some House names to the senator with the same surname (Representative Gloria Johnson's votes to Senator Jack Johnson); a senator can't vote in the House, so those 22,573 votes go to the House member.
• Absent members aren't named. A member who held a seat that day and isn't named didn't vote, so members' start and end dates matter: names and terms come from Open States, and where its dates differ from the record we follow the record: Representative Jeff Burkhart died on November 14, 2025, and Representative G.A. Hardaway on April 24, 2026.
• The General Assembly's member lists are on the same site, so each build checks our current members against the members the roll calls name in each chamber's last days of floor votes, with the changes since: Representative T.J. Hardaway took his father's seat on May 7, 2026, Representative Joe Towns resigned on August 31, 2026 to become Shelby County's Criminal Court Clerk, and Representative Ron Travis resigned effective October 1, 2026, after taking office as Rhea County Executive (their letters are printed in the House Journal). House Districts 31 and 84 are vacant.
• Photos are the official portraits from capitol.tn.gov. The site turns away automated readers, so they were saved by hand in a browser, each checked against the member's page on the General Assembly's site. A member without one shows initials.
• Records left out, one by one: House SB 1385, 2025-04-07: 8 members recorded, fewer than a quorum; House SB 1414, 2025-04-16: 11 members recorded, fewer than a quorum; Senate SJR 585, 2026-02-02: the record says only 'TEST MOTION ENTRY', not what was voted on (32-1); Senate SB 2026, 2026-03-04: the record names no motion (33-0); House HB 1640, 2026-03-12: the record says only 'MOTION', not what was voted on (68-18); House SJR 28, 2026-03-12: the record says only 'MOTION', not what was voted on (68-18); House SB 1654, 2026-04-06: 6 members recorded, fewer than a quorum; House SJR 650, 2026-04-22: the record says only 'REGULAR CALENDAR 2', not what was voted on (69-19); House consent calendar, 2026-02-09 (7 bills and resolutions): counts (95-0) but no names on any bill's copy.

Votes with the Speaker

• Tennessee's presiding officers vote like any member: the Speaker of the House, Cameron Sexton (District 25), and the Speaker of the Senate, Randy McNally (District 5), a senator the Senate elects, who also holds the title of Lieutenant Governor. Each held the office for every roll call here.
• The score is the share of roll calls on which the member voted the same way, aye or no, as their chamber's Speaker. A roll call counts only when both of them voted aye or no. Speaker Sexton voted on 1,425 of 1,473 House roll calls (no on 140); Lieutenant Governor McNally on 4,430 of 4,545 Senate roll calls (no on 11).
• The headline number uses contested votes. On unanimous votes nearly everyone agrees with the Speaker, so the share on all votes, shown alongside, is high for almost everyone.
• A score needs at least 20 votes. The Speakers 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 Speaker's position here is the Speaker'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 (628 in the House, 318 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 held a seat, on which they didn't vote aye, no or present and not voting.
• The records name only the members who voted or were recorded present and not voting, so they don't say why a member didn't vote, or whether the absence was excused. The pages say “didn't vote”, never “missed” or “excused”.
• “Present and not voting” is a member's choice to be recorded without taking a side. It counts as voting, as “Present” does on the Congress pages, and the vote pages list it apart.

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 10 of those votes.
• Tennessee legislators break from their party on party-line votes about as often as members of Congress (one in ten breaks on at least 7.6% of them, against 7.4% in Congress), so the Tennessee pages use Congress's own color steps: purple at 10%, then 7.5, 5, 3 and 1.5%.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced this term: 2,579 House bills and 2,660 Senate bills. Joint resolutions and House and Senate resolutions aren't counted, and neither is a bill withdrawn.
• A bill counts for its prime sponsor in its own chamber. Co-sponsors aren't counted. Where a sponsor left and their successor took the bill over (Representative Michael Lankford, Representative Burkhart's), it counts for the sponsor the bill page names.
• Every Tennessee bill has a companion, the same bill filed in the other chamber with its own sponsor, and only one of the two goes to the Governor: the other chamber substitutes it for its own. A bill whose companion became law counts as passed for its sponsor too, shown apart.
• Passed both chambers: the bill went to the Governor. It became law when he signed it or let it become law without his signature, and the Secretary of State numbered it: a public chapter, a law for the whole state (1,142 this term, and 7 from the January 2025 extraordinary session), or a private chapter, an act for one county, city or district that usually takes effect only if its local governing body approves it (74). Each build checks that the chapters run from 1 without gaps and that each is on exactly one bill that carried. Governor Lee vetoed 2 bills (SB 455, HB 1882); no veto was overridden.
• Private acts are local bills: counted and shown, but not ranked. The ranked number is statewide 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

• Tennessee's appropriations act doesn't say which legislator asked for an item, so there's no budget figure for Tennessee legislators.

The November 3 ballot

• All 99 House seats and the 17 odd-numbered Senate seats are on the ballot; the even-numbered Senate seats were elected in 2024 for terms to 2028.
• The candidates are the ones the Secretary of State's Division of Elections lists for the November 3 general election in its Tennessee Senate and Tennessee House lists: each party's nominee from the August 6 primary, and the independent candidates who qualified (195 in all). No candidate qualified for House District 93.
• The Division's file host turns away the network these pages are built on, so its lists were read in a browser on October 18, 2026 and saved as printed. A change after that day isn't shown until they're read again.
• The lists don't mark incumbents, so a candidate is shown as the incumbent when their name is the seat holder's, allowing for a nickname (Sabi “Doc” Kumar), a first initial (J. Adam Lowe) or a full first name (Rebecca Keefauver Alexander, who serves as Becky Jo Alexander).
• A candidate who serves in the General Assembly now links to their voting record.

Bill explanations

Tennessee vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the bill's summary as the General Assembly writes it, and the page links to the bill on the General Assembly's site, where its full text, amendments and 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 Tennessee legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every Tennessee 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-house.csv: How every Tennessee House member voted on each floor roll call.
• member-votes-senate.csv: How every Tennessee Senate member voted on each floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every Tennessee bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: Tennessee House: current members match the chamber's own list — 97 members and 2 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Tennessee Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 33 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Tennessee: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 5,239 sponsor credits on 5,239 bills
• PASS: Tennessee: every bill's prime sponsor matched to one legislator; public and private chapters numbered 1 to N once each — 2025–26 private chapters 1-74; 2025–26 public chapters 1-1142; 2025 X1 public chapters 1-7
• PASS: Tennessee: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes-house.csv, member-votes-senate.csv
• PASS: Tennessee: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 132 seats
• WARN: Tennessee: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — 9 vote(s) not credited (each with its reason): House SB 1385, 2025-04-07: 8 members recorded, fewer than a quorum; House SB 1414, 2025-04-16: 11 members recorded, fewer than a quorum; Senate SJR 585, 2026-02-02: the record says only 'TEST MOTION ENTRY', not what was voted on (32-1)
• PASS: Tennessee: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Tennessee: every vote page's bill has its title — 6018 votes
• PASS: Tennessee: every current legislator has an official portrait — 130 portraits
• PASS: Tennessee: the district map has every seat, and only those — 99 House districts, 33 Senate districts
• PASS: Tennessee: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Tennessee: every Tennessee roll call's names add up to its printed counts, name members serving that day once, and every consent calendar's copies agree — all of them
• PASS: Tennessee: Tennessee: passage, adoption and concurrence tallies agree with the bills' histories — 5,350 of 5,470 agree; 25 differ only in members present and not voting, 95 by a vote or two (the roll call is followed)
• PASS: Tennessee: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 116 races