Methodology

Everything on Roll Call Track traces back to a primary U.S. government record. This page explains where the data comes from, how it is updated, and what it can't tell you.

Votes

House roll-call votes come from the Office of the Clerk (clerk.house.gov). Senate roll-call votes come from senate.gov. For each vote we store the roll-call number, date, question, measure, result and every member's position (yea, nay, present, not voting). Party breakdowns are computed from those positions. Only recorded roll-call votes are included. Voice votes and unanimous-consent agreements have no member-by-member record, so they do not appear in vote tables or scores.

Members

Each member page lists party, state, chamber, bills sponsored and cosponsored, recent roll-call votes and a bipartisanship score. Members are matched to records by their official Congressional Bioguide ID.

Bills

Bill titles, sponsors, status and actions come from Congress.gov for the current (119th) Congress. Bills are linked to the roll calls taken on them.

Stock trades (STOCK Act)

Trades come from periodic transaction reports (PTRs) filed with the House Clerk (disclosures-clerk.house.gov) and the Senate Electronic Financial Disclosure system (efdsearch.senate.gov). A scheduled job checks for new filings once a day, in the early morning Central time. Scanned paper filings are read with optical character recognition (OCR); if no transactions can be recognized on a scanned filing, it is not added as trades.

Disclosure lag. The STOCK Act requires members to report a covered transaction within 30 days of learning of it, and no later than 45 days after the trade. So a trade can appear on the site up to about six weeks after it happened, or later if a member files late. We show both the transaction date and the filing date when the filing lists them.

Amounts are ranges. Filers report the value in set ranges (for example $1,001–$15,000 or $15,001–$50,000), not exact amounts. We show the range as filed.

Who traded. Reports cover the member, their spouse and dependent children. We show the owner field the filing lists.

Party labels and edge cases

• Party is shown as the member's current affiliation. Independents are labeled Independent (I).
• Vacancies, special elections and new members: a seat's page shows the current officeholder; earlier votes stay with the member who cast them.

Limitations

• Data is only as complete and timely as the official sources. Outages at a source can delay updates. Data pages show a "Data updated" line with the latest vote and disclosure dates, and a notice when a disclosure source has not updated for more than 48 hours.
• A trade listing is a disclosure, not proof of wrongdoing or of profit.
• Bipartisanship scores use only recorded votes and treat all votes equally.
• We do not cover committee votes or campaign finance.

Corrections

See our Editorial & Corrections Policy or email mac@rollcalltrack.com.