How the Virginia scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the General Assembly's own records. Its Legislative Information System (LIS) publishes data files for anyone to download: one lists every recorded vote with each member's vote, and the bills' histories say what each vote decided, with its date and the tally the clerk printed. We use every floor roll call of the House of Delegates and the Senate in the 2026 Regular Session (January 14 to March 14, and the reconvened session of April 22) and the 2026 Special Session I (April 23 to June 29, which passed the budget): 3,186 roll calls (1,577 in the House, 1,609 in the Senate), Jan. 14, 2026 to June 29, 2026.
• A roll call is used only if it lists every member serving that day exactly once, each tied to the legislator who held that seat. All of them did. Where a bill's history prints a tally that differs from the members' votes (13 of 5,738 history lines, most of them where a member's statement in the record says how they meant to vote), we follow the members' votes.
• The Senate takes some recorded votes that no bill's history names: each day's motions to dispense with reading the Journal and to waive reading the House's messages, some floor amendments, and votes taken again after a reconsideration. We identify them from the Senate's daily minutes, which list every recorded vote in order with its tally. A vote is matched to a line of the minutes only where nothing else could be meant: its tally is the only one of its kind among that stretch of the day's votes that the histories don't name (110 Senate roll calls). The vote page links to that day's minutes.
• Left out: the House's 38 attendance roll calls at the start of each day, which aren't votes on a question; and 84 recorded votes (75 in the Senate, 9 in the House) that neither a bill's history nor the minutes identify with certainty, most of them unanimous (8 contested). They aren't counted in any score.
• One Senate vote can decide many bills at once (a “block vote”), as the Senate does for bills no one opposes; it counts as one roll call, and its page says how many bills it covered (140 such roll calls).
• Committee and subcommittee votes aren't included. Neither are voice votes, which don't record how each member voted.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yes and no votes: 974 in the House and 949 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 name each member by their General Assembly member number (“H0334”), which Open States records for each legislator. Every number on every roll call matched exactly one legislator holding that seat that day.
• Names, terms and contact details come from Open States. Where it differs from the General Assembly's own records, we follow those: the 16 delegates the 2025 election replaced served until the new House convened on January 14, 2026 (Open States has January 24); Delegates Mark Sickles, David Bulova and Candi Mundon King left the House on January 17 to join Governor Spanberger's cabinet, and Senator Ghazala Hashmi left the Senate that day to become Lieutenant Governor; Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, elected to the Senate in a special election, took the oath on February 19 (the Senate's minutes); Delegate Barry Knight died on February 19; and Delegate Michelle Maldonado resigned on May 31.
• Delegate Knight was absent all session because of illness. The House's records list him, as not voting, on every roll call through February 16, and not on February 17's, although the House granted him leave on February 18 and 19; those February 17 roll calls don't count for him.
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and the Senate's own member lists, names and parties. Committee assignments come from Open States.
• Photos are official portraits from the General Assembly's member data service and the Senate's member list. Senators who left during the term aren't on the Senate's list, so they show initials.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate Majority Leader

• The Speaker of the House of Delegates, Don Scott (District 88), votes like any member: he voted on 1,575 of 1,577 House roll calls.
• The Senate's president is the Lieutenant Governor, who isn't a senator and votes only to break a tie. So senators are compared with the Senate Majority Leader, Scott Surovell (District 34), who leads the majority on the floor, as the Georgia pages compare senators with their Majority Leader. He voted on 1,603 of 1,609 Senate roll calls.
• The score is the share of roll calls on which the member voted the same way, yes or no, as their chamber's leader. A roll call counts only when both of them voted yes or no. The Speaker voted no on 98 roll calls and the Majority Leader on 115, so this score mostly shows how often a member votes with what the majority's leadership supports.
• 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 (859 in the House, 786 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 them as not voting. Virginia's records don't say why: a member who was absent, on a leave the chamber granted, or present and didn't vote is recorded alike, so this share counts all of them.
• An abstention is a vote, recorded apart from yes and no: it isn't counted here as not voting, and it doesn't count toward the leader or party scores.
• “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 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.
• Most Virginia legislators rarely break from their party on party-line votes (the median is 1.2%, against 1.7% in Congress), but those who do break more often than members of Congress: one in ten breaks on at least 10.5% of them, against 7.4% in Congress. So, as on the New Jersey and Pennsylvania pages, each color step starts at twice Congress's level: purple at 20% rather than 10%, then 15, 10, 6 and 3%. That keeps purple for the few who cross most often.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced in the 2026 Regular Session, from the Legislative Information System: 1,530 House bills and 836 Senate bills. Joint resolutions (among them proposed constitutional amendments) and resolutions aren't counted.
• A bill counts for its chief patron, as the General Assembly lists it; chief co-patrons and co-patrons aren't counted. Virginia often passes identical House and Senate bills; each counts for its own chief patron. One bill, HB 7, was prefiled by Mike Jones as a delegate before he left the House for the Senate, so it isn't credited to anyone.
• Passed both houses: the bill went to the Governor (728 House bills, 429 Senate bills). It became law when the Governor approved it (1,126) and didn't when the Governor vetoed it (31). The laws tie out to the 2026 Acts of Assembly, chapters 1 to 1,132, each used once (the joint resolutions proposing constitutional amendments share the numbering). The budget, HB 30, was taken up again in the Special Session I and became chapter 1 of that session's Acts.
• Where the bill files disagree with a bill's history, we follow the history: SB 643 is marked passed, but its history ends with the two houses agreeing to different conference reports, so it didn't pass; HB 275 is marked not passed, but both houses passed it and it is chapter 98.
• Virginia doesn't mark local bills apart, so every bill counts the same way. The ranked number is bills that passed both houses.
• 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 session had less time to pass bills.

Budget projects

• Virginia's budget is changed item by item through amendments that each name the legislator who proposed them, but these pages don't count budget amendments yet.

The November 3 ballot

• Virginia's General Assembly isn't on the November 3, 2026 ballot: all 100 House of Delegates seats and all 40 Senate seats are next elected on November 2, 2027. One seat is on the ballot: the 20th House District, vacant since Delegate Michelle Maldonado resigned on May 31, 2026, holds a special election for the rest of the term. Enter your address to see your districts.
• The candidates are the ones the Virginia Department of Elections certified for the 20th District's special election, as its candidate list (last updated Oct. 9, 2026) showed them on Oct. 17, 2026.
• Virginia voters also elect a U.S. senator and their members of the U.S. House on November 3: the ballot guide for Congress lists those races.

Bill explanations

Virginia vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the bill's catchline as the General Assembly lists it, and the page links to the bill on the Legislative Information System, with its text and summary.

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 Virginia legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every Virginia 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 Virginia legislator voted on every floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every Virginia bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: Virginia House: current members match the chamber's own list — 99 members and 1 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Virginia Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 40 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Virginia: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 2,365 sponsor credits on 2,365 bills
• PASS: Virginia: every bill's chief patron tied to one legislator, every passed bill's outcome known, chapters 1 to 1,132 once each — 1,126 laws, 31 vetoed
• PASS: Virginia: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Virginia: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 140 seats
• PASS: Virginia: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Virginia: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Virginia: every vote page's bill has its title — 3186 votes
• PASS: Virginia: every current legislator has an official portrait — 145 portraits
• PASS: Virginia: the district map has every seat, and only those — 100 House districts, 40 Senate districts
• PASS: Virginia: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Virginia: every roll call names every member serving that day once, each tied to the seat's holder — all of them
• PASS: Virginia: the tallies the bills' histories print agree with the members' votes — 5,725 of 5,738 agree; the members' votes are followed for 13
• PASS: Virginia: recorded floor votes no bill history or Senate minutes line identifies are few — 38 House attendance roll calls and 84 other votes left out (8 contested)
• PASS: Virginia: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 1 races