How Roll Call on the Capitol Ledger collects, validates, and publishes U.S. congressional vote and financial disclosure data — provenance, update cadence, validation, and limitations.
Everything published here traces back to a primary U.S. government record. This page documents where the data comes from, how often it updates, how it is parsed and validated, and where its limits are.
Data provenance: Congress.gov API (Library of Congress); Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives; U.S. Senate Electronic Financial Disclosure (eFD); GovTrack; Congressional leadership press releases (RSS); Google News (RSS); GDELT Project (DOC 2.0 API).
Update cadence: roll-call votes and bill actions are polled continuously and refreshed on the page about once a minute. Financial disclosure filings are ingested by a scheduled job that runs daily and de-duplicates filings by their source document URL, so re-runs never create duplicates.
Bipartisanship scores: a member receives a score from 1 to 10 based on how often they vote with the majority of the opposing party on recorded roll calls. A score of 1 means the member frequently crosses party lines; a score of 10 means they vote almost entirely with their own party. Scores use only recorded votes.
Dollar figures in financial disclosures are legally reported as ranges, not exact amounts. We publish those ranges exactly as filed and never estimate, interpolate, or average within a range.
Every ingested filing must carry a source URL and pass field-level validation for chamber, filing type, dates, and amount ranges. Filings whose member cannot be matched to the current congressional roster are routed to a manual review queue instead of being published.
Judicial accountability scores are built only from documented, source-linked events: SCOTUS stay or reversal, nationwide injunction, vacatur of non-party, standing rebuke, recusal conflict, and circuit reversal or vacatur. Each event carries a weight from 1 to 5; the rogue score runs 0–100 and is banded as within bounds, watch, or rogue. Judges with no tracked events are listed as insufficient record — not an exoneration, only an absence of documented events.
Where enough documented record exists, an ideology score from −100 (liberal) to +100 (conservative) is published alongside a label (liberal, moderate, conservative, or prior-only). A judge with no scorable record shows no lean.
This site is not affiliated with the U.S. government and takes no position on any member, party, or bill.