How the Vermont scores work

The vote records

• Vermont's representatives and senators both serve two-year terms, so this term is the 2025–2026 biennium of the General Assembly, which convened on January 8, 2025: 184 floor roll calls (76 in the House, 108 in the Senate), Jan. 31, 2025 to May 29, 2026. The General Assembly held no special session in the biennium.
  • 2025 Session: 28 House and 48 Senate roll calls, Jan. 31, 2025 to June 16, 2025.
  • 2026 Session: 48 House and 60 Senate roll calls, Jan. 23, 2026 to May 29, 2026.
• Vermont's chambers decide nearly everything by voice vote; a roll call is taken when members demand the yeas and nays (in the House, one member, sustained by four others) and on every vote on a Governor's veto. So there are few roll calls, and they are the contested questions: of the House's 76, 61 were contested.
• Every roll call comes from the House or Senate Journal, the official record of each day, which prints the question, the result, the counts and every member's vote by name ("Arsenault of Williston" in the House, by surname in the Senate). Each is also checked against a second record of it: the Clerk of the House's roll-call books for 2025 and 2026, which print every House roll call with its number, and the Secretary of the Senate's book for 2025. A roll call kept here appears in both with the same day, counts and members on each side (76 House roll calls and 48 Senate roll calls of 2025), and every roll call the Journals print is in the books. The Secretary of the Senate hasn't posted a 2026 book, so the Senate's 60 roll calls of 2026 come from the Senate Journal alone.
• Where the book and the Journal differ on a name, with the same counts, the member is the one the rest of both records agrees on, and each difference is listed: the Clerk's 2026 book prints “Kascenska of Burk” on roll call 57 (May 6, 2026), where the House Journal prints “Kascenska of Burke”; the Clerk's book lists the Speaker as absent on roll call 36 (March 13, 2026), when Rep. Houghton presided; the House Journal doesn't list her.
• The Senate's 33 roll calls confirming the Governor's appointees are included, each titled with the appointee and the position as the Journal gives them. Committee votes, voice votes, divisions and the chambers' ballots (the House's election of its Speaker and the Joint Assembly's votes) aren't.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 61 in the House and 53 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 name is tied to the one member holding a seat that day: in the House by surname and town, with the initial the records print where two members of one town share a surname ("Morgan, L. of Milton"); in the Senate by surname. Every roll call must name every member serving that day once, but the presiding officer.
• The Speaker presides over the House and isn't on its roll calls, except when another member has the chair (3 roll calls: the book or the Journal says who presided, and that member isn't on the lists) and when the Speaker votes from the chair on a Governor's veto (1). A senator presiding in the Lieutenant Governor's absence is listed as absent "(presiding)" and isn't counted on that roll call. The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate but isn't a senator.
• Members, districts, parties and when each left office come from the House's and Senate's lists of the biennium's members, kept by the General Assembly. Mari Cordes (House, Addison-4) resigned on June 19, 2025; Karen Lueders, appointed by the Governor, took the oath on January 6, 2026. Heather Surprenant (House, Windsor-4) resigned on September 29, 2025; Michael Hoyt, appointed by the Governor, took the oath on January 6, 2026. Samuel Douglass (Senate, Orleans District) resigned on October 27, 2025; John Morley III, appointed by the Governor, took the oath on December 16, 2025. Larry Hart (Senate, Orange District) resigned on November 14, 2025; John Benson, appointed by the Governor, took the oath on January 6, 2026. Jim Harrison (House, Rutland-11) resigned on January 6, 2026; Valorie Taylor, appointed by the Governor, took the oath on January 7, 2026. Casey Toof (House, Franklin-8) resigned on January 16, 2026; Jack Brigham, appointed by the Governor, took the oath on February 24, 2026. Robert Hooper (House, Chittenden-18) resigned on March 16, 2026; Kevin Scully, appointed by the Governor, took the oath on April 16, 2026. Chris Taylor (House, Chittenden-Franklin) resigned on March 27, 2026; Kase Long, appointed by the Governor, took the oath on April 1, 2026. Francis McFaun (House, Washington-Orange) resigned on April 3, 2026; David Soucy, appointed by the Governor, took the oath on April 9, 2026. In each case every roll call names the member serving that day.
• Parties are the ones the General Assembly's lists give. A member nominated by two parties is listed with both, the party they belong to first ("Democratic, Progressive"). Members are scored with the first: Democratic/Progressive members as Democrats and Republican/Democratic members as Republicans. Progressive/Democratic members and independents belong to neither major party, and are scored against the party they vote with more often on party-line votes, as Congress's independents are with the party they caucus with. Vote pages count them together as "Others."
• Rep. Troy Headrick of Burlington, elected as a Progressive, is listed as an independent; the Clerk of the House records that his affiliation changed "after the convening of the 2025–26 Biennium" but gives no day, and no record we found does, so he's shown as an independent throughout. His scores are the same either way: neither label is a major party.
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and Senate's member lists of 2026-10-23: names, districts and parties.
• Photos are the official portraits on each member's page at legislature.vermont.gov. David Soucy, Jack Brigham, Jim Casey, Kevin Scully, Leland Morgan have none there; their pages show their initials.

Votes with the House Majority Leader or Senate President Pro Tempore

• The House's Speaker, Jill Krowinski (Chittenden-16), elected Speaker on January 8, 2025 and Speaker since 2021, presides and voted on 2 of the House's 76 roll calls, too few to measure anyone against. So the House is measured against its Majority Leader, Lori Houghton (Chittenden-22), whom the House Democratic caucus elected in December 2024: an office of the majority caucus, not of the House, so no House record names it. The Senate is measured against its President Pro Tempore, Philip Baruth (Chittenden-Central), elected by the Senate on January 8, 2025 and President Pro Tempore since 2023, who votes like any senator but when he 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 Majority Leader voted on 74 of 76 House roll calls (nay on 23); the President Pro Tempore on 105 of 108 Senate roll calls (nay on 18).
• 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 (48 in the House, 37 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; with so few roll calls, members who took office during the biennium may have none.
• 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 House lists members "absent with leave of the House and not voting", the Senate members "absent and not voting"; neither says why, so these pages say "didn't vote". A member recorded as abstaining declined to vote yea or nay; that counts as an abstention, not as not voting.
• "In office" means the roll call lists the member: each one lists every seated member, whether or not they voted. The Speaker, who presides, isn't shown a share.

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.
• Vermont legislators break from their party on party-line votes more often than members of Congress: one in ten breaks on at least 17.3% of them, against 7.4% in Congress, and the median legislator on 2.9%, against 1.7%. So the Vermont pages use the color steps of Arkansas and New Mexico, 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 biennium, from the House and Senate Journals, which print each bill as it's introduced with the members who introduced it: 957 House bills and 331 Senate bills. Resolutions aren't laws and aren't counted. A bill keeps its number for the whole biennium: H. 454 introduced in 2025 is still H. 454 in 2026.
• A bill counts for the member the Journal names first, in the chamber where it was introduced; a committee's bill (55 of 1,288) counts for no one.
• Passed both chambers: on the General Assembly's list of bills passed by the House and Senate (140 House bills, 66 Senate bills). It became law when it became an Act, signed by the Governor, allowed to become law without his signature, or passed over his veto (191 laws). 13 were vetoed and stood.
• Proposals 3 (a right to collective bargaining) and 4 (equal protection) to amend the Vermont Constitution, which the preceding General Assembly adopted and this one adopted again, go to the voters on November 3 (the Governor's proclamation of July 28, 2026). They were introduced in the 2023–2024 biennium, so they're shown as sent to the voters and count for no member.
• 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 biennium had less time to pass bills.

Budget projects

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

The November 3 ballot

• All 150 House seats and all 30 Senate seats are up, for two-year terms; the members elected take office when the General Assembly convenes on January 6, 2027. Districts elect one, two or three members, and each voter may vote for as many candidates as the district elects.
• The candidates are the Secretary of State's list of the general election's qualified candidates, last updated September 23, 2026 (296 candidates; 59 run in races with no more candidates than seats). A candidate nominated by two parties is listed with both, the party the candidate belongs to first. The list also prints each candidate's address, phone and e-mail; only names, parties and districts were kept.
• The address lookup and the district map use the districts of the 2022 reapportionment, 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, 19 of the Vermont House's 76 roll calls and 18 of the Vermont Senate's 108 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

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

Checks

• PASS: Vermont House: current members match the chamber's own list — 150 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Vermont Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 30 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Vermont: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 1,231 sponsor credits on 1,231 bills
• PASS: Vermont: every bill's first-reading sponsor tied to one legislator serving that day; every bill the General Assembly lists as passed by both chambers is an Act, vetoed, or awaiting action — all of them
• PASS: Vermont: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Vermont: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 125 seats
• PASS: Vermont: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Vermont: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Vermont: every vote page's bill has its title — 184 votes
• WARN: Vermont: every current legislator has an official portrait — 5 without (initials shown): Jim Casey (House A-R), Kevin Scully (House C18), Jack Brigham (House F-8), Leland Morgan (House GIC), David Soucy (House WAO)
• PASS: Vermont: the current term hasn't ended — through 2027-01-05
• PASS: Vermont: the district map has every seat, and only those — 109 House districts, 16 Senate districts
• PASS: Vermont: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Vermont: every roll call names every member serving that day once (the presiding officer excepted), each tied to the one member holding a seat, and adds up to its counts; every House roll call and every 2025 Senate roll call agrees with the Journal member for member — 184 roll calls: 76 House (book and Journal), 48 Senate 2025 (book and Journal), 60 Senate 2026 (Journal)
• PASS: Vermont: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 125 races