About This Site

Our mission is to provide a comprehensive and accurate resource for information about the United States Congress. We strive to make it easy for people to find and understand who their elected officials are, what they stand for, and how they vote on important issues.

To achieve this mission, we gather information from a variety of sources, including official government websites, news outlets, and other reliable sources. We then organize and present this information in an easy-to-use format that is accessible to everyone.

The metrics we have chosen to focus on for this site are party-line votes. We believe that these votes provide valuable insight into the positions of individual legislators and their alignment with their political party. By providing a detailed breakdown of each legislator's voting record, we hope to help people better understand the political landscape in Washington D.C.

Understanding how we summarize the data on this site is key to understanding how we present information about legislators. Here we define a party-line vote for any individual lawmaker as a vote that satisfies one of two conditions:

• The legislator's vote on a bill put forward by their own party was not "Nay", OR
• The legislator's vote on a bill put forward by the opposition party was not "Yea".

What kind of votes are tracked?

For the purposes of this site, not all votes are created equal. For example, as of April 17, 2025, the House has held 102 roll call votes, and the Senate has held 213 roll call votes. This is not the total number of votes that have been taken in Congress, however. A roll call vote is a vote where individual lawmakers are called by name, one by one, and prompted to enter their vote on the bill at hand. Not all votes in Congress are roll call votes, and those that are not are not tracked here.

It is worth noting that a bill may receive several roll call votes. An extreme example of this would be Senate Concurrent Resolution 7, better known as the Senate version of the House's budget bill for 2025. On a single bill, there were 27 roll call votes cast, most of which were votes on individual amendments. Because we can track the sponsor for each individual amendment, we can determine for each of those 27 votes whether a vote was a party-line vote or not.

There are some cases, for example with nominations, or other procedural votes that do not require a sponsor, where a sponsoring party is not explicitly named. In these cases, in order to have sponsor data for the vote, we default to the majority party for this session of Congress.

Your level of partisanship plays a significant role in how you perceive the political process. For one who is hyper-partisan, you would likely prefer to see most, if not all, votes be party-line votes; you want your party to be unified either in support of or in opposition to the will of the opposing party. However, for someone who is less partisan, you may be more interested in seeing a mix of votes, as it may reflect more of a willingness to work together despite ideological differences.

Ultimately this site does not try to explicitly take a position on partisanship either way, for or against. Both the partisan and the non-partisan, the Democrat and the Republican, are welcome to look at this data and draw their own conclusions.

There are a few caveats to be aware of when looking at this data:

1. Not all votes are shown. Because there can be (and often are) more than one vote for each issue under consideration, and the logic for what is and is not a "party line vote" can flip depending on the kind of vote, we have made the decision only to display the most recent vote on any given matter. Why it matters: The percentage of party line votes we display for a legislator may be higher or lower than in reality when all "internal" votes on a bill are taken into account. However, in a selection of test cases, this did not seem to push any of legislators over the 50% line from a "not party line" to a "party line" legislator.
2. Independent legislators: Independent legislators are currently rare, but when they do appear, for the purposes of deciding whether a given vote is a party-line vote, we use the party they caucus with as a substitute for their party. Hence why a legislator like Bernie Sanders will have party line votes that align with Democratic Party goals, even though he is not registered with the Democratic Party.
3. Nominations: Nominations are not considered "bills" in the upstream data source we use, and as a result votes on nominations do not come with a "sponsor party". In these cases, we use the majority party as the "sponsor party" when determining whether a vote on a nomination is a party-line vote.

The data powering this site comes primarily from the @unitedstates/congress repository, from the @unitedstates project. This open-source collection of tools scrapes several official Congressional websites on a daily basis to retrieve bill and vote information. We have taken additional steps to further normalize some of this data and load it into a database format that supports querying and more in-depth searching. Specifically, we pull Vote, Bill, and Legislator datasets daily and integrate them into the database, where this web app can query it to generate the information you see throughout the site. Most likely, inaccuracies you may find here are a result of incorrect querying or summarizing, rather than incorrect upstream data.

We use geolocation data from IPInfo when you first visit the site or click the location icon. The only information we store as a result of this call is the state detected as your location. If you are using a VPN, this information may not be accurate as some VPNs cloak your location. Your detected state is stored as a cookie while you are browsing the site.

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