How the Washington scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the Legislature's own records: its Legislative Web Services, which give each floor roll call on a bill with every member's vote by the Legislature's member ID, the same roll calls each bill's “Roll calls” page on leg.wa.gov lists and the House and Senate Journals print by name. We use every House and Senate floor roll call of the 69th Legislature's 2025 and 2026 Regular Sessions, 2,459 roll calls (1,201 in the House, 1,258 in the Senate), Jan. 24, 2025 to March 12, 2026. There was no special session. The Legislature next meets in January 2027.
• Two Senate roll calls weren't on a bill: a motion to return two of the Governor's appointments to him (February 5, 2025) and a motion to advance to the ninth order of business (April 19, 2025). The web services list only votes on bills, so these come from the members' own roll-call records (below), and Senator Bill Ramos's vote on each, as the Senate Journal names it.
• A roll call is used only if its members' votes add up to its counts, it names every member serving that day exactly once, and every member ID is one legislator. All of them did. The web services list 2 roll calls twice, the two entries identical; each is used once.
• As a check from a second source, the Legislature also publishes each member's own roll-call record for each year (each member's page on leg.wa.gov, “Voting records”): every vote the chamber's voting system recorded while they served. Every roll call here is in the record of every member it lists, with the same day, bill, item number and counts, and the same vote: 178,607 votes checked. The Legislature publishes no record for a member who has left office, so the votes of Bill Ramos are checked against the web services alone. Every vote with an item number in the members' records is one of the roll calls here.
• The House's records also hold 99 votes with no item number: divisions, mostly on amendments, where the presiding officer had the members vote to count them and the Journal prints only the totals (“Division was demanded … The result was 39 - YEAS; 47 - NAYS”). They aren't roll calls, so they aren't included.
• We leave out elections of officers, which are votes for a nominee rather than on a question: the House's election of its Speaker on January 13, 2025 (Laurie Jinkins 58, Drew Stokesbary 39), and the Senate's elections of its President Pro Tempore, Vice President Pro Tempore and Secretary on the same day.
• The Senate's votes to confirm the Governor's appointments are included. Each vote page names the appointee as the record prints the name.
• Committee votes aren't included. Neither are voice votes, which don't record how each member voted.
• The House's records print whether each question carried, and its vote pages show it: 190 House roll calls failed. The Senate's records don't, so its vote pages show the yeas and nays only.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 639 in the House and 481 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 roll call gives every member's vote by the Legislature's member ID, and each member's roll-call record is filed under the same ID, so each vote goes to exactly one legislator; we also check that the legislator held a seat in that chamber on the day. Open States' data on Washington legislators records the ID in most legislators' portrait address; the rest are the one legislator in that chamber and district this term with the member's surname.
• Names and terms come from Open States. Where its dates differ from the Legislature's own records, we follow those: Victoria Hunt served in the House from January 13, 2025 until the King County Council appointed her to the Senate on June 3, 2025 (Open States has only her Senate seat); Emily Alvarado's seat from 2023 until her appointment to the Senate on January 21, 2025 was in the House, not the Senate; and Senator Bill Ramos died on April 19, 2025.
• Each House district elects two representatives, to Position 1 and Position 2. Each build checks our current members against the Legislature's own member list: names, parties and, for representatives, positions.
• Photos are the members' official portraits from leg.wa.gov, the one each member's page offers as a “print quality photo” (the Legislature keeps them for members who have left, too), cropped to the pages' portrait size.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate Majority Leader

• Members are compared with the Speaker of the House, Laurie Jinkins (District 27), Speaker since 2020 and re-elected on January 13, 2025, and the Senate Majority Leader, Jamie Pedersen (District 43), whom the Senate Democrats chose as their leader on November 11, 2024. Both vote like any member, and each held the office for every roll call here. The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate 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 1,196 of 1,201 House roll calls (nay on 189); the Majority Leader on 1,258 of 1,258 Senate roll calls (nay on 39).
• Both leaders are Democrats, 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 (557 in the House, 385 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”, an absence the chamber excused, or “Absent”. Neither chamber records abstentions.
• “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.
• Washington legislators break from their party on party-line votes more often than members of Congress (one in ten breaks on at least 13.1% of them, against 7.4% in Congress), about as often as South Carolina's and Pennsylvania's, so the Washington 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.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every House and Senate bill of the 2025–26 biennium, from the Legislature's Legislative Web Services: 1,748 House bills and 1,363 Senate bills, the budget bills included. A bill keeps its number through the biennium (a 2025 bill not passed that year came back in 2026). Joint memorials (requests to Congress or federal agencies), joint resolutions (proposed amendments to the state constitution, which go to the voters), concurrent resolutions and each chamber's own resolutions aren't counted.
• A bill counts for its prime sponsor, the legislator who introduced it, by member ID. Co-sponsors aren't counted, and neither are the committees that rewrite a bill as a substitute (“SHB”, “2SSB”): the substitute keeps the original's prime sponsor. House bills whose prime sponsors introduced them before the session and left the House before its first roll call count for no one, because those sponsors aren't House members on these pages: HB 1059 (Emily Alvarado), HB 1082 (Tana Senn), HB 1090 (Emily Alvarado), HB 1212 (Emily Alvarado), HB 1217 (Emily Alvarado), HB 1350 (Emily Alvarado). Emily Alvarado was appointed to the Senate on January 21, 2025, and Tana Senn resigned on January 22, 2025.
• Passed both chambers: 389 House bills and 302 Senate bills. A bill became law when it got a session law chapter, whether the Governor signed it, let it take effect without his signature, or vetoed part of it (16 partial vetoes: Washington's Governor can veto whole sections of a bill, and single items of an appropriations bill); it didn't if he vetoed it in full (1). Each build ties the Legislature's list of bills that passed to its session laws of 2025 and 2026 and its list of full vetoes, bill for bill, checks that the members' roll-call records mark the same bills vetoed in full or in part, and checks that each year's chapters run without a gap; chapters 1 and 2 of 2025 aren't bills (Initiative 2066, approved by the voters in November 2024, and the salary schedule of the Citizens' Commission on Salaries for Elected Officials).
• Washington doesn't mark local bills apart, 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 biennium had less time to pass bills, and the chairs of the budget committees sponsor the budget bills.

Budget projects

• Washington's budget acts don't name the legislator who asked for an item, so there's no budget figure for Washington legislators.

The November 3 ballot

• Every House district's two positions are on the ballot, each its own race, and 24 of the 49 Senate seats; senators serve four years, and the other 25 were elected in 2024 for terms to January 2029 (the 5th District's again in November 2025, after an appointment).
• Washington's primary is top-two: every candidate for a seat runs in one August primary, and the two with the most votes advance to November whatever their party, so two candidates of the same party can face each other, and where only one candidate was left the ballot has one name. Each candidate states a party preference, which the ballot prints (“Prefers Democratic Party”); the parties don't nominate or approve them. These pages show each candidate's preference as they stated it.
• The candidates are the Washington Secretary of State's, from its candidate list for the November 3 general election (VoteWA), exported Oct. 18, 2026. The list doesn't mark incumbents, so a candidate is shown as the incumbent when their name is the current holder's of that seat and position. A legislator running for another seat links to their voting record.
• One race is for a short and a full term: Representative Zach Hall was appointed to the 5th District's Position 1 in June 2025, after filing for the 2025 election had closed, so the winner also serves the rest of the current term, to January 2027.

Bill explanations

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

Checks

• PASS: Washington House: current members match the chamber's own list — 98 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Washington Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 49 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Washington: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 3,105 sponsor credits on 3,105 bills
• PASS: Washington: every bill's prime sponsor matched to one legislator, every bill that passed is a session law or a veto — all of them
• PASS: Washington: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Washington: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 98 seats
• PASS: Washington: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Washington: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Washington: every vote page's bill has its title — 2459 votes
• PASS: Washington: every current legislator has an official portrait — 149 portraits
• PASS: Washington: the district map has every seat, and only those — 49 House districts, 49 Senate districts
• PASS: Washington: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Washington: every roll call's votes add up to its counts, name every member serving once by member ID, and match each member's own roll-call record — all of them; 178,607 votes checked against the members' records (no record published for Bill Ramos)
• PASS: Washington: every vote in the members' records with an item number is a roll call here — all of them
• PASS: Washington: divisions (votes the Journal records only as totals) are left out — House 99, Senate 0
• PASS: Washington: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 73 races