How Congress voted,
roll call by roll call.

The sources

• House roll calls — the Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives: one XML file per roll at clerk.house.gov/evs/<year>/roll<number>.xml. The question, the kind of vote, the result, the totals by party and each member’s name, party, state and vote are the Clerk’s.
• Senate roll calls — the United States Senate: the list of a session’s votes and one XML file per vote, under senate.gov/legislative/LIS/. The Senate says of them: “Information compiled through Senate LIS by the Senate bill clerk under the direction of the secretary of the Senate.”
• Bill status — govinfo, the Government Publishing Office’s repository: the bill-status bulk data at govinfo.gov/bulkdata/BILLSTATUS, whose content the files credit to the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress. “Records that just changed” is govinfo’s own feed of its bill-status batches.
• The President’s desk and the two floors — Congress.gov, the Library of Congress: its public RSS feeds (bills presented to the President; House floor today; Senate floor today).

None of the four needs a key or an account. Three of the four cannot be read by a browser on another site (Congress.gov’s feeds can); all four are asked through this site’s own relay, so one copy serves every reader and the page talks to no other host. Every list, roll and bill on the page names the source it was read from and the time of the read. If the people who run this site have given the relay a Congress.gov API key, a bill and the “just changed” list are read through that API instead, and the line under them says so; without one, everything above is how the whole page works.

How fresh it is

• The lists. While this page is open and in view it asks again every two minutes, and the relay looks for new votes in each chamber at most once in two minutes however many people are reading. A House roll appears once the Clerk has posted its file; a Senate vote once the Senate has added it to its list. How long either takes after the gavel is theirs, not this page’s.
• A roll. A vote from the last three days is re-read every ten minutes (Senate) or thirty (House), in case the source corrects it; an older one is kept for thirty days. The newest House roll is asked for again every hour whatever its age.
• A bill. govinfo rebuilds its bill-status files in batches through the day, so its copy of a bill can trail Congress.gov by some hours; each bill prints the time govinfo last updated it. The relay keeps a bill for fifteen minutes.
• The feeds. Read again every ten to fifteen minutes.

When a source is slow, down or limiting requests, the line above the list says so in the relay’s own words, the page keeps what it last read with its time, and the relay leaves the source alone for a while before asking again. Nothing is ever filled in from a sample or a guess.

Reading a result

The result is the source’s word (“Passed”, “Failed”, “Agreed to”, “Rejected”, “Confirmed”), followed by the count of each vote word on the roll. The threshold is the one the source files the vote under — the Clerk’s vote type, or the Senate’s “majority required” — and the one-line note on a kind of question (cloture, suspension of the rules, a motion to table) describes the procedure, not the measure. The bar is drawn from the same counts; its segments differ by pattern and are named in the key.

What this page does not know

• Votes that are not roll calls. Most measures pass by voice vote or unanimous consent, with no names recorded. They are not here; a bill’s list of actions says when one happened.
• Why. “Not Voting” is all the record says: not whether a member was absent, paired or recused. Nothing here says why anyone voted as they did.
• Committee votes, amendments decided by voice, and anything before 2021. The relay reads votes from 2021 on and bills from the 113th Congress on; the page offers the last four years and Congresses.
• Full names and districts in the House. The Clerk’s roll prints a last name, with a state where two members share one, and no district. They are printed as given.
• Times in the Senate’s list. The list gives a day and no time; a Senate vote’s own file gives a time without a zone, which is Washington’s clock. House times are the Clerk’s, Eastern.
• Everything a bill can go through. The milestones are five that the Library of Congress codes in the action list: introduced, passed or agreed to in each chamber, presented to the President, became law. A failed vote, a veto, a conference or an amendment between the chambers is not a milestone here: read the latest action and the list.
• Nominations and treaties. A Senate vote on a nomination has no bill to look up; its description is the Senate’s.
• The newest House roll, for certain. The Clerk publishes no list for the year, so the relay finds the newest roll by asking for the next number, and the two after it in case one is missing. A roll the Clerk has not posted yet cannot be seen; a number it has no file for, or a file the relay cannot read as a roll, is named in the House line rather than guessed at.
• Whether “no file” means “no vote”. When a source has no file at the address this page reads, the page says exactly that and does not call the list live. It cannot tell a vote that has not been posted from a file the source has moved.

This page is not an official record of either chamber. The official proceedings are the House Journal, the Senate Journal and the Congressional Record, and every roll and bill here links to its source.

Rights and credit

Works of the United States Government are not subject to copyright in the United States (17 U.S.C. § 105); govinfo’s bill-status files say so of themselves (“not subject to copyright protection and is in the public domain”). None of these sources asks for a fee, a key or a licence for this use. Credit is given because it is owed: the Office of the Clerk of the House; the Secretary of the Senate; the Government Publishing Office (govinfo); the Congressional Research Service and the Library of Congress (Congress.gov). labs.llc is not affiliated with any of them, and nothing here is endorsed by them.

What you type

The chamber, dates, word and member search sift what the page already holds: they are not sent anywhere. A vote you open and a bill you look up go to this site’s relay as a year and a number, and from the relay to the source as the address of that one public file; the relay sends the source nothing about you. It keeps the answers for every reader, counts requests per network address for five minutes under a keyed hash so that no one can drive it hard, and keeps no log of its own. The view is written after the # of this page’s address so that it can be sent to somebody; the site’s analytics, on labs.llc, may record the address as it stands. Corrections: labs@labs.llc.