The Whole Voting Record

A bill is not one vote. It is a committee vote, a rule, a procedural motion, an amendment filed to strip the bad part out, a passage vote, a conference, and sometimes an override — and a member can be on the record at every one of them. This feature collects all of it, one row per person per act, each row linked to the official record.

A provision moves through six stages and the same member is on the record at four of them, so quoting only the final-passage row hides the other three; three separate files hold the roll calls, the authorship acts, and the executive acts.

What it does

Each law the movement has identified as carrying a problem gets its own directory. Inside sits the record of the instrument — the citation down to the specific sections, the vehicle it rode inside, what the text does — and beside it a roll-call file with one row per member per roll call.

A row carries the roll call id, the chamber, the date, the stage, the question put to the chamber verbatim, the member's name and party, their position, and a source URL. The verbatim question is not decoration: "procedural" plus "nay" is unreadable, while On Motion to Table the Amendment plus "nay" is a fact a citizen can act on.

Two columns are kept apart and never merged. The position — yea, nay, present, not voting — is a public fact with an official citation, and it is stated plainly. The movement's reading of what that position did to the problem sits in its own labelled column, always presented as our reading rather than as a finding about the person.

The stage is the point. There are six: committee, procedural, amendment, passage, conference, veto override. A member who votes to table the amendment that would have stripped the provision, then votes no at final passage, appears twice, and only both rows together are honest. Quoting the final-passage row alone is how a voting record gets laundered; collecting every stage is the defense against it.

Authorship is a second file, not a column. Contribution rows name one person and one act: sponsor, cosponsor at introduction, cosponsor later, cosponsor withdrawn, committee chair, floor manager, conferee, amendment filer, discharge-petition signer. Signing on the day a bill drops is a different act from signing on after two hundred names are already there, so the two are separate kinds with their own dates. Authorship weighs heavier in the award arithmetic than any single floor vote, because who wrote a law is more informative than who was present at the roll call.

Executive acts are a third file with its own ladder — signature, veto, pocket veto, executive order, revocation, becoming law unsigned. A President casts no vote, so a record of roll calls alone would leave the most powerful seat in the country out entirely. Those rows are never rendered as votes.

The goal it serves

A press release quotes final passage. It is the last thing that happens to a bill, usually the least informative, and it is chosen precisely because the earlier rows say something the quote does not. The amendment vote that would have removed the provision, and the procedural motion that kept that amendment off the floor, are the rows nobody circulates.

Collecting the whole record is what turns an accusation into a measurement. "This member helped pass a bad law" is something to shout back at. "Here is the section, here is the vehicle it rode inside, here are four roll calls with the question printed on each one, and here is the link to the House Clerk" is something a reader checks in a browser tab and either confirms or corrects. That is why arguing about it online settles nothing and this movement measures instead, and why the Monkey and Llama awards take nothing but the voting record as input.

It also decides who can be held to account at all. Without the authorship file, a member who wrote one of these laws and never voted on it contributes nothing to any number we publish. Without the executive file, the branch that casts no vote is flattered by construction. A record that stops at roll calls protects the people with the most power over the outcome.

What keeps it honest

• Not every vote on the vehicle belongs here. A must-pass authorization attracts dozens of unrelated amendment votes. Only acts on the provision itself go in the file, and everything left out is listed with a count and a reason. A silent exclusion reads as "we recorded everything"; a named one can be argued with.
• Absence is never read as opposition or support. Present and not voting are neutral on every roll call, always.
• A row with no source URL is dropped, not warned about — and the drops are counted in the open. An empty file is a correct result. A guessed vote is not.
• A layer with no member-level record writes no rows at all. A voice vote, a unanimous-consent action, a committee decision taken without objection: each produces one named gap instead of an invented position. The gap is the finding: nobody is on record on that provision.
• This record feeds two awards and stops there. What a person voted, authored, or blocked goes to Monkey and Llama and nowhere else. Interviews, resumes and public commitments never come near these rows.

Works with

• The Vote That Was Never Allowed — the companion record for the stage where a vote is prevented rather than cast.
• The Law Page — where these rows are actually read: one instrument, its ladder, and every person on the record at each rung.
• The Official Record Or Nothing — the sourcing rule that decides which of these rows is allowed to exist in the first place.

Where to go next

• Voting Records — how the public record is fetched, read, and turned into an award percentage.
• What counts as a vote — which roll calls belong to a provision and which ones only look like they do.
• Do the math yourself — take these rows and reproduce the award arithmetic without trusting us.
• Elected Politicians — the roster this evidence supports, how to find your own seat, and how a record is disputed.
• Take Action — what to do once you have read it.