How the West Virginia scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the chamber's own record of it, as wvlegislature.gov publishes it: the measure, the question, the day and time, the tally and every member's vote by name. Delegates serve two-year terms, so this term is the 87th Legislature, whose members took office on December 1, 2024: 2,668 floor roll calls (1,344 in the House of Delegates, 1,324 in the Senate), Feb. 13, 2025 to March 14, 2026. The Legislature held no extraordinary session in the term.
  • 2025 Regular Session: 637 House and 611 Senate roll calls, Feb. 13, 2025 to April 12, 2025.
  • 2026 Regular Session: 707 House and 713 Senate roll calls, Jan. 14, 2026 to March 14, 2026.
• The Legislature's site says its copies of bills, Journals and bill status information aren't the official versions, which are printed. These pages use its copies and check each one against a second record of the Legislature's own:
  • Each record's lists must add up to its tally and name every member serving in that chamber that day exactly once.
  • The chamber's Journal must print the same roll call. The House Journal numbers each roll call as the record does and names the members on every side but the larger one: the counts must be the same, and every member it names must be on that side in the record. The Senate Journal names every senator on every side but doesn't number its roll calls: each record is paired with a roll call printed that day naming the same senators on the same sides, in the order taken. Every roll call here met this check, except the ones the Journal doesn't print, listed below.
  • Where the Constitution sets the vote a question needs, the result must agree with it: two-thirds of the members elected (67 delegates, 23 senators) for a bill to take effect sooner than ninety days after passage, or to propose a constitutional amendment; a majority of the members elected (51 and 18) to agree to the other chamber's amendments; four-fifths of the members present to dispense with reading a bill on three different days.
• Where the House Journal misprints a roll call, the record is followed: 2025 House Roll No. 556: the Journal leaves out the count of absent members; it names Lucas and Worrell, as the record does (98-0-2); 2025 House Roll No. 62: the Journal counts 3 absent and names Fluharty, Green and Vance; the record names Linville too (82-14-4); 2025 House Roll No. 63: the Journal counts 3 absent and names Fluharty, Green and Vance; the record names Linville too (86-10-4); 2025 House Roll No. 640: the Journal's count (62-36) carries the motion to table, but its sentence says the motion failed; the record says adopted; 2026 House Roll No. 343: the Journal counts 6 absent and names 7, the same 7 as the record (90-2-7); 2026 House Roll No. 544: the Journal lists Delegate Flanigan among the absent; the record has him excused from voting (Rule 49), the House's own count; 2026 House Roll No. 714: the Journal counts 30 yeas and 9 absent and names 29 and 10, the same members as the record (29-60-10); 2026 House Roll No. 716: the Journal's sentence says the amendment was adopted with a majority "not having voted in the affirmative"; its count (69-26) and the record carry it; 2025 House Roll No. 178: the Journal names nay 25 of 32 (the record names them all); 2025 House Roll No. 230: the Journal names not_voting 7 of 10 (the record names them all); 2026 House Roll No. 714: the Journal names yea 29 of 30 (the record names them all).
• The Legislature's lists of roll calls don't link every record, so every number in each chamber's sequence was tried: 21 House and 7 Senate records the lists don't link were found this way, and each was checked against the Journals like the rest.
• The Senate's votes to confirm the Governor's nominations are included, titled by the nominations each one confirmed, as the Senate Journal records them.
• The House sometimes adopts many concurrent resolutions on one roll call (11 roll calls). Its Journal prints these without a number or a tally, only the resolutions and the members absent; each record is paired with the Journal's entry that day naming the same absent members.
• Quorum calls aren't votes and aren't included, and neither are elections of officers, committee votes or votes the chambers take without a roll call (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 yeas and nays: 294 in the House and 144 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 members by surname, with an initial where two serving that day share one (“Smith, B”, “Cannon, D”); the House's names the Speaker “Speaker Hanshaw” and the Senate's the President “Mr. President”. Each name is tied to the one member holding a seat in that chamber that day it can be, and each roll call must name every member serving that day exactly once. Every name on every roll call used met these checks.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on West Virginia legislators. Where it differs from the Legislature's records, we follow the records: the Journals print the day each new member took the oath of office, and every roll call lists every seated member, which shows the last day a departing member served (8 dates fixed). In the House, David Kelly (District 8) left before Bill Bell took the oath on July 14, 2025; Tom Clark (District 48) resigned in September 2025, and Gregory Watt took the oath on October 15; Brandon Steele (District 42) resigned on December 18, 2025, and John Jordan took the oath on January 13, 2026; Mike DeVault (District 74) resigned on January 12, 2026, and Guy Ward was appointed on January 28; Trenton Barnhart (District 9) moved to the Senate on January 28, and Betsy Kelly took his House seat on February 18; and Larry Kump (District 94) died on February 28, 2026, during the session. In the Senate, Mike Stuart (District 7) resigned on October 9, 2025, and Zack Maynard was sworn in on November 5; Donna Boley (District 3) resigned on January 8, 2026, and Barnhart was sworn into her seat on the afternoon of January 28. Barnhart, Ward and Betsy Kelly took their seats after that day's roll calls, which don't name them. In each case every roll call names the member serving that day. Bill Flanigan, Daniel Linville and Elliott Pritt left the House after the 2026 session.
• No legislator changed parties during the term: every member is listed with one party throughout.
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and Senate's rosters of Oct. 22, 2026: names, districts and parties.
• Photos are the official portraits the Legislature's rosters show. A member who left during the term isn't on today's roster; their portrait is the one the roster showed while they served, as the Internet Archive's copies of the roster page record it.
• 4 roll calls the chamber's records hold aren't printed in its Journal, which records the question as decided without a roll call; each is kept because the Legislature's roll-call list gives the same measure, day and result: 2025 House roll call 299 (HB 2777, 2025-03-31, Amendment rejected); 2025 House roll call 300 (HB 2777, 2025-03-31, Amendment rejected); 2025 House roll call 522 (SB 825, 2025-04-11, Effective from passage); 2025 House roll call 550 (SB 154, 2025-04-11, Amendment rejected).
• House roll calls the Journal announces without printing them, kept with a note on the vote's page: 2025 House Roll No. 386 (HB 2026): the Journal prints the budget bill's passage (Roll No. 385) and then declares it effective from passage by two-thirds, without this roll call's number or counts; 2025 House Roll No. 496 (HB 2026): the Journal declares the budget bill effective from passage by two-thirds without this roll call's number or counts; 2026 House Roll No. 509 (SJR 9): the Journal declares SJR 9 adopted by two-thirds but prints in its place Roll No. 510, SB 29's passage (yeas 92, nays 2: Anders and Gearheart), which it prints again under SB 29 (House Journal, March 13, 2026, pp. 29-30); it prints no Roll No. 509.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate President

• Each chamber elects its own presiding officer, who votes like any member: Speaker Roger Hanshaw (District 62), Speaker since 2018, chosen again on January 8, 2025, and Senate President Randy Smith (District 14), elected by acclamation the same day. West Virginia has no separately elected lieutenant governor: the Senate President is first in line to act as governor, and the law gives him the title of Lieutenant Governor as well.
• 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 1,182 of 1,344 House roll calls (nay on 63); the Senate President on 1,292 of 1,324 Senate roll calls (nay on 32).
• 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 (244 in the House, 120 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 list members who didn't vote as absent or not voting and don't say why, so these pages don't say “missed”.
• A member with a personal interest in a question can ask to be excused from voting on it (House Rule 49, Senate Rule 43); one the chamber excused is present but doesn't vote, and counts as abstaining, not as not voting (6 roll calls have one).
• “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 3 in 10 of those votes.
• West Virginia legislators break from their party on party-line votes far more often than members of Congress: one in ten breaks on at least 28.7% of them, against 7.4% in Congress, and the median legislator on 10.5%, against 1.7%. So the West Virginia pages use color steps three times Congress's: purple at 30% rather than 10%, then 22.5, 15, 9 and 4.5%. That keeps purple for those who cross most often: 7 of the 134 current members.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced in the term, from the Legislature's bill lists: 3,290 House bills and 2,065 Senate bills over both sessions, budget bills included. Each session numbers its own bills, so HB 2024 of 2025 and HB 2024 of 2026 are different bills. Resolutions aren't laws and aren't counted, except joint resolutions proposing amendments to the Constitution.
• A bill counts for its lead sponsor, the first sponsor its record names, in the chamber where it was introduced; co-sponsors aren't credited. The Legislature's list of each member's bills holds every bill they sponsor, lead or co-sponsor, so a bill that never left committee and has one sponsor is that member's; for every other bill the lead sponsor is the one its own page names, and the lists holding it must be the sponsors its page names. The Speaker and the Senate President are lead sponsors of the bills the Governor asks the Legislature to take up.
• On October 23, 2026, the Legislature's site failed for hours on its Senate bill pages, and it wouldn't serve the pages of 285 Senate bills of 2026 that never left committee and had several sponsors. For those, the lead sponsor is the first senator the Senate Journal names when it records the bill's introduction (“By Senators …: Senate Bill 80”), who must be one of the bill's sponsors on the members' lists. On the Senate bills that have both, the Journal and the bill's own page name the same lead sponsor 971 times out of 972 (2026 SB 978: the Senate Journal, February 17, 2026, p. 12 names Barrett on introduction; its page names Tarr lead sponsor; the page is followed).
• Committee bills whose pages the site wouldn't serve name no member as sponsor and aren't credited to anyone: 2026 SB 1080 (Senate Journal, February 24, 2026, p. 60: originating in the Committee on Education); 2026 SB 1081 (Senate Journal, February 26, 2026, p. 33: originating in the Select Committee on School Choice).
• 2026 HB 4756: its page prints an Act's chapter number, but its history shows it never left committee and the bill list says 'Pending'; it isn't counted as law.
• Passed both chambers: sent to the Governor (305 House bills, 251 Senate bills). It became law when the Governor approved it or let it become law without his signature (537 laws). 18 were vetoed and didn't become law. 1 proposed constitutional amendment went to the voters. It's SJR 9 of 2026 (only citizens of the United States who are citizens of the state may vote), Amendment 1 on the November 3, 2026 ballot. Both chambers also adopted HJR 42 of 2026 (the homestead exemption), but the Senate amended its title and the House didn't agree to the change before the session ended, so it isn't on the ballot.
• 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

• West Virginia's budget bill doesn't say which legislator asked for an item, so there's no budget figure for West Virginia legislators.

The November 3 ballot

• All 100 House of Delegates seats are up, for two-year terms. Each Senate district's two seats are elected in alternate even years: in each of the 17 districts, the seat whose term ends this year is up, for four years. In Districts 3 and 17 the other seat is up too, for the last two years of its term: the senators elected to them in 2024 left office, and the senators appointed in their place serve until this election. Which seat is up comes from the Secretary of State's list of current office holders (August 31, 2026). The members elected take office on December 1, 2026.
• The candidates are the ones the Secretary of State's 2026 General Candidate Listing names for the November 3 general election (237 candidates): each party's nominee from the May 12 primary and candidates nominated by petition. Write-in candidates (7) aren't printed on the ballot; the races they're in say so. The listing also carries candidates' mailing addresses and contact details: only names, parties and districts were kept.
• The address lookup and the district map use the districts the Legislature drew in 2021, which the elections of 2022 and 2024 used 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, 192 of the West Virginia House of Delegates's 1,344 roll calls and 155 of the West Virginia Senate's 1,324 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

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

Checks

• PASS: West Virginia House: current members match the chamber's own list — 100 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: West Virginia Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 34 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: West Virginia: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 5,352 sponsor credits on 5,352 bills
• PASS: West Virginia: every bill's status in the Legislature's lists agrees with its history; every bill that passed both chambers law, vetoed or sent to the voters; each bill credited to its lead sponsor — all of them
• PASS: West Virginia: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: West Virginia: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 117 seats
• PASS: West Virginia: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: West Virginia: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: West Virginia: every vote page's bill has its title — 2668 votes
• PASS: West Virginia: every current legislator has an official portrait — 145 portraits
• PASS: West Virginia: the current term hasn't ended — through 2026-11-30
• PASS: West Virginia: the district map has every seat, and only those — 100 House districts, 17 Senate districts
• PASS: West Virginia: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: West Virginia: every roll call's lists add up to its tally and name every member serving that day once, each the one member holding a seat that day; the chamber's Journal prints the same roll call with the same counts and the same members on each side; every question is a known motion and every result agrees with the record, the Journal and the vote the Constitution requires — 2,668 roll calls (1,344 House, 1,324 Senate)
• PASS: West Virginia: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 117 races