How VotedBy works

VotedBy shows official records only, in the words Congress used. Every page links to its source.

Where the data comes from

• House votes: the Clerk of the House (clerk.house.gov).
• Senate votes: the Senate's Legislative Information System (senate.gov).
• Bills, their path and summaries: GovInfo bill status records, including summaries written by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
• Members, terms and IDs: the public congress-legislators project; photos from the public unitedstates/images project (official portraits), or, where it has none, a U.S. government photo from Wikimedia Commons that is in the public domain.
• Districts: the U.S. Census Bureau.

How a vote is checked before it appears

• The official totals must match the individual votes, member by member.
• Every voter must be identified, and must have been in office in that chamber on that day.
• If anything doesn't match, the vote is held back and listed on the coverage page.

How votes are shown

• Positions use the exact official wording: Yea, Nay, Aye, No, Present, Not Voting, and others. We never say "abstain".
• Each vote shows the exact official question. A short plain-language label (for example "Accepting the Senate's changes") is derived only from that question.
• A vote is only called a vote on a bill's passage when the official question says so. Many votes are on amendments or procedure.
• Party letters show the party recorded at the time of that vote.
• In a Senate tie, the Vice President's vote is shown separately; it is not one of the 100 senators' votes.
• Colors only group positions. They are never red/blue or red/green, and they don't mean good or bad.

Bill icons

The ring around a bill fills as it moves: introduced, passed one chamber, passed both, sent to the President, and gold when it became law. A gray ring means it stopped (failed or vetoed). Simple resolutions only need one chamber, so their ring is full once that chamber agrees. The numbers inside are the Yeas and Nays on the bill's final vote.

Sponsors and leaders

A bill's sponsor is the member who introduced it; cosponsors are members who formally signed on, as listed in the official bill record. Party leaders (the Speaker, each chamber's majority and minority leaders and whips, the Senate's President pro tempore) and Vice Presidents come from the House and Senate's official lists, checked by hand. Each vote shows who led that chamber on the day of the vote. The Vice President votes only to break a tie in the Senate, so a Vice President's page lists only those votes.

Popular names and "most viewed"

Highlights use only neutral signals: a bill's popular name (from the Congressional Research Service, or VotedBy's reviewed list of widely used names, each with cited sources) and how often its page is viewed on VotedBy over the past week. VotedBy counts page views without tracking anyone: no cookies, no scripts, and no search terms are recorded.

Updates and corrections

New votes are checked every 15 minutes; bills and members daily. Every source file is kept, and if an official record changes after we publish it, we record exactly what changed. Found a mistake? Tell us.