# Votes on Record

> How every member of Congress voted, sorted by time in office. One grid for each Congress on the site (the 117th, 118th and 119th so far): everyone who served in it, and how each one cast their final vote on every recorded item. Facts only, from the official record, rebuilt every night.

Votes on Record is run by Dan Campbell, a private citizen. It has no ads, no accounts and no tracking.

## What the record is made from

- Roll calls: the House Clerk's and the Senate's own roll-call files (clerk.house.gov, senate.gov); when senate.gov cannot be reached, the Senate's roll calls as printed in the Congressional Record (govinfo.gov), each checked against Congress.gov.
- Bills, resolutions, nominations, their actions and text: Congress.gov.
- People and their terms: the open unitedstates/congress-legislators dataset, checked against the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (bioguide.congress.gov), whose dates are used where the dataset's are wrong by months or years; differences of days or weeks in how the two count a special election or an appointment are left as the dataset has them.
- Every chamber's tallies in the grid are checked against the official totals before anything is published.

## Rules the site keeps

- Facts only: votes, dates, tallies, dollar amounts and section numbers as written in the official record. Missing data is shown as missing, never guessed.
- No party colours, no ratings or scores, no campaign-finance data.
- A column is an item's final vote. Procedural votes and amendment votes are listed on the item's page, not in the grid. An item a chamber passed without a roll call is shown as such: the record names no member's position.
- Time in office counts the years a person actually served in Congress and the White House.
- Summaries and "Unexpected Items" are written by an AI model, Claude Sonnet 5.5, from the official text of the bill. Every line names the section it came from, and checks confirm that the section exists and that every dollar figure appears in it as written. Each says whether it was published after those checks alone or approved by a person.
- "Changed after House passage" (or Senate) compares the text one chamber passed with the final text both chambers passed.
- Corrections are dated and listed on the Corrections page, and never made silently.

## Citing the site

Name "Votes on Record" and link the page the fact is on, for example https://votesonrecord.org/item/119-hr-1, and name the official source that page gives. To report an error: https://votesonrecord.org/report

## Pages

- [The current Congress](https://votesonrecord.org/): the grid
- [The 118th Congress](https://votesonrecord.org/2023-2024): the grid for 2023-2024
- [The 117th Congress](https://votesonrecord.org/2021-2022): the grid for 2021-2022
- An item: https://votesonrecord.org/item/{id}, for example [H.R. 1](https://votesonrecord.org/item/119-hr-1). The id is the Congress, the kind and the number: 119-hr-1, 119-s-1071, 119-hjres-87, 119-pn-1129 (a nomination)
- A person: https://votesonrecord.org/member/{id}, for example [Chuck Grassley](https://votesonrecord.org/member/G000386). The id is usually the person's Biographical Directory id
- [How this works](https://votesonrecord.org/how-this-works), [Corrections](https://votesonrecord.org/corrections), [Who pays for this](https://votesonrecord.org/who-pays), [Privacy](https://votesonrecord.org/privacy)
- [Every page](https://votesonrecord.org/sitemap.xml)

Each item and person page carries its facts as plain text, for readers that do not run JavaScript.

## The public data files

The website reads these files, the district maps and the share pictures, and nothing else. They are public JSON; no key or sign-in is needed. Their format may change: start from meta.json.

- [meta.json](https://votesonrecord.org/data/meta.json): the published Congresses, the current file name of each one's grid, and when each source was last updated
- A Congress's grid, https://votesonrecord.org/data/grid/{name}.json (the name is in meta.json): `columns` (the items, newest first), `rows` (the people), `cells` (one character per person per item, row by row) and `legend` (what each character means: Y Yea, N Nay, P Present, - Not voting, ~ passed without a roll call, S Signed, V Vetoed, and the rest)
- An item, https://votesonrecord.org/data/item/{id}.json: its titles, outcome, each chamber's vote and tally with the roll-call source, the President's action, amendments and other recorded votes, the published summary, and its sources
- A person, https://votesonrecord.org/data/member/{id}.json: their terms, service, attendance and office contact
- [The Corrections log](https://votesonrecord.org/data/corrections.json)