How the Wisconsin scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the Legislature's electronic roll-call records, one page per roll call on its document site: the session, the proposal and its author, the question, the counts, every member's vote by surname, the vacant districts, who presided, and the day and time. Wisconsin's Assembly members serve two years and its senators four, and the 2025–2026 Legislature began on January 6, 2025, so we use every floor roll call of its sessions: 562 roll calls (302 in the Assembly, 260 in the Senate), Jan. 6, 2025 to May 13, 2026.
  • 2025 Regular Session: 275 Assembly and 242 Senate roll calls, Jan. 6, 2025 to March 17, 2026.
  • July 2025 Extraordinary Session: 25 Assembly and 17 Senate roll calls, July 2, 2025 to July 3, 2025.
  • May 2026 Special Session: 2 Assembly and 1 Senate roll calls, May 13, 2026.
  The July 2025 Extraordinary Session, which the Committee on Assembly Organization called, took up the Regular Session's budget bills. The Governor also called an April 2026 Special Session, on redistricting (Executive Order 285); neither chamber took a roll call in it. The Legislature's last floor period for general business ended in March 2026.
• Each chamber numbers its roll calls in order for the whole two years. The Senate's list skips number 79: there's no record of it on the site, and the Senate Journal prints no roll call between numbers 78 and 80, so none is missing.
• A roll call is used only if every name ties to one member serving that day, each list adds up to the count it prints, it names every member serving exactly once, and the seats left over are the vacant districts it prints. All of them did. No seat was vacant at any roll call this term: every record prints “No vacant districts”.
• As a second reading, every roll call is compared, member by member, with the chamber's Journal, the Chief Clerk's official record of each day, which prints each roll call with the members' names: 562 of 562 agree, and every roll call the Journals print has its record. Whether a question carried is what the Journal prints after the lists (“Motion carried.”, “Passed.”, “Concurred in.”, “Refused concurrence.”).
• When two members on opposite sides agree that neither will vote, a pair, the Assembly's record names them only in a note (“Paired aye”, “Paired nay”); they count as not voting (24 roll calls). Members who ask afterward to be recorded as voting one way don't change the tally, and aren't counted that way.
• In Wisconsin the second chamber passes a bill by concurring in it (“Shall Senate Bill 45 be concurred in?”); the vote pages call that “Passage by Concurrence”. Concurring in the other chamber's amendment to one's own bill is “Concurrence in Assembly Amendments”.
• Committee 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 yeas and nays: 225 in the Assembly and 196 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 in capitals, with an initial where two share one (“JACOBSON, B”), and the Speaker as “SPEAKER”. The Senate's records cut a name at 14 letters (“DASSLER-ALFHEI”). Each name goes to the one legislator holding a seat in that chamber that day whose surname it is (or begins with, for a name cut short). Every name on every roll call used matched exactly one legislator. The Assembly's records also print each member's party, and every one matches ours.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on Wisconsin legislators. No seat changed hands during the term, and Open States' dates needed no correction.
• Each build checks our current members against the Assembly's and the Senate's member lists, names and parties.
• Photos are the official portraits on the Legislature's member lists. A member without one shows initials.

Votes with the Speaker or Senate Majority Leader

• The Speaker of the Assembly, Robin Vos (District 33), elected Speaker on January 6, 2025, votes on every roll call; the records list him as “SPEAKER”.
• The Senate elects a President, who presides: Mary Felzkowski (District 12) since January 6, 2025. The majority party's caucus elects the Majority Leader, Devin LeMahieu (District 9), who chairs the Committee on Senate Organization, which sets every floor calendar (Senate Rules 18 and 20), and who moves the Senate's business on the floor. Senators are compared with the Majority Leader, the leader of the chamber's majority and its agenda. Both he and the President vote on every roll call: a senator in the chair still votes (Senate Rule 3m). The Journals name Vos as Speaker and LeMahieu as Majority Leader from January 6, 2025 to their latest mentions, September 8 and October 1, 2026, so every roll call of the term falls in their tenure.
• 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 302 of 302 Assembly roll calls (nay on 1); the Majority Leader on 260 of 260 Senate roll calls (nay on 3).
• 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 (212 in the Assembly, 184 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.
• Every Wisconsin legislator this term is a Democrat or a Republican, and none changed party.
• 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 such members as “Not voting” and don't say why, so these pages don't say “missed” or “excused”. A paired member counts as not voting.
• “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 10 of those votes.
• Wisconsin legislators break from their party on party-line votes less often than members of Congress: one in ten breaks on at least 5.4% of them, against 7.4% in Congress, and the median legislator on 0.5%, against 1.7%. So the Wisconsin pages use Congress's own color steps: purple from 10%.
• Gray seats: no party-line score.

Bills passed

• Every bill introduced this term, from each bill's history on the Legislature's site: 1,239 Assembly bills and 1,186 Senate bills, the May 2026 Special Session's included. Joint resolutions (proposed constitutional amendments, which go to the voters, and the session schedule) and resolutions aren't bills and aren't counted.
• A bill counts for its lead author, the first legislator named when it was introduced, linked by the Legislature's member number. Coauthors and cosponsors aren't counted. A bill a committee introduced counts for no member (94 bills, such as the Joint Legislative Council's and those introduced at the Governor's request).
• Passed both chambers: the bill was enrolled and sent to the Governor (198 Assembly bills, 145 Senate bills). It became law when it got an Act number: the Governor signed it, or vetoed only parts of an appropriation bill, which his partial veto allows (247 laws, 3 of them partly vetoed). It didn't when he vetoed it (96 vetoes); neither chamber overrode a veto. A vetoed bill that wasn't taken up again before the last general-business floor period ended is recorded as failing to pass over the veto (Joint Rule 82), without a vote.
• Each build checks that every Act on the Legislature's list of 2025 Wisconsin Acts is one bill's, and that every veto message is a vetoed bill's.
• 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. The Joint Committee on Finance introduces the budget bills, which count for no member.

Budget projects

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

The November 3 ballot

• All 99 Assembly seats and the 17 odd-numbered Senate seats are on the ballot. Senators serve four years: those of the even-numbered districts were elected in 2024, and their seats are next on the ballot in 2028.
• Every district was redrawn by 2023 Wisconsin Act 94 for the 2024 election, which used the new lines for the Assembly and the even-numbered Senate districts. The senators of the odd-numbered districts were elected in 2022 and represent the lines in place then until their terms end in January 2027; the November 3 election fills their seats on the new lines. The district map and the address lookup use the new lines, and the lookup says so on the card of each odd-numbered Senate district: the senator shown may not represent the address.
• The candidates are the ones the Wisconsin Elections Commission lists for the November 3 General Election, in its list of all contests and candidates of October 6, 2026; its earlier list by office (August 25) names the same legislative candidates and each seat's incumbent, who is the member these pages show holding it. The Commission's site closes itself to scripts, so its files were saved by hand through a browser. An independent candidate may have a statement of up to five words printed on the ballot in place of “Independent” (two this year: “Serving People Not Parties” in Senate District 15 and “American Solidarity Party” in Assembly District 51); the pages say “Independent”, as the Commission's list does. Write-in candidates aren't named.

Bill explanations

Wisconsin vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill yet. Each page's title is the bill's relating clause as the Legislature writes it, and the page links to the bill's history on the Legislature's site, where its text and the Legislative Reference Bureau's analysis 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 Wisconsin legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every Wisconsin 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 Wisconsin legislator voted on every floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every Wisconsin bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: Wisconsin House: current members match the chamber's own list — 99 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Wisconsin Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 33 members and 0 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Wisconsin: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 2,331 sponsor credits on 2,331 bills
• PASS: Wisconsin: every bill's lead author tied to one legislator by member number; every 2025 Wisconsin Act and every veto message one bill's — all of them
• PASS: Wisconsin: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes.csv
• PASS: Wisconsin: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 132 seats
• PASS: Wisconsin: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Wisconsin: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Wisconsin: every vote page's bill has its title — 562 votes
• PASS: Wisconsin: every current legislator has an official portrait — 132 portraits
• PASS: Wisconsin: the district map has every seat, and only those — 99 House districts, 33 Senate districts
• PASS: Wisconsin: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Wisconsin: every roll call's names tie to one member serving that day, add up to its printed counts, name every member serving once and leave empty only the districts it prints as vacant — all of them
• PASS: Wisconsin: every roll call is in its chamber's Journal, member for member, and every Journal roll call has its record — 562 agree
• PASS: Wisconsin: each bill history's floor tally agrees with the roll call it links to — 572 agree
• PASS: Wisconsin: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 116 races