Sources & methodology

Every number here has a paper trail

The Vote Files is an archive of every congressional roll-call vote since 1789, and of the executive orders presidents signed, reproduced from official government records. The site never takes sides. It publishes what the record says, links to where the record lives, and labels the few figures it computes itself.

113,568roll calls 26,401,356individual records 12,678member files 10,607executive orders May 16, 1789first vote Sep 30, 2026latest vote

Data as of October 19, 2026

The sources

What feeds the archive

Source Coverage

Voteview · UCLA 1789 to present The complete roll-call archive, compiled from the official Journals of the House and Senate and from the Congressional Record. Provides every member-level vote on this site, member ideology scores (DW-NOMINATE, a standard measure of where members fall politically), and historical party affiliations. Lewis, Jeffrey B., Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal, Adam Boche, Aaron Rudkin, and Luke Sonnet. Voteview: Congressional Roll-Call Votes Database. https://voteview.com/

Senate.gov · United States Senate 1989 to present Official roll-call vote records of the Senate, 1989 (101st Congress) to present. Every Senate measure page in that window links its Senate.gov record.

Clerk of the House 1990 to present Official roll-call vote records of the House of Representatives, 1990 to present. Every House measure page in that window links its Clerk record.

Congress.gov · Library of Congress 1973 to present Official bill pages, details and summaries, 1973 (93rd Congress) to present. Linked from measure pages where available.

GovInfo · US Government Publishing Office 1993 to present Official full bill text, 103rd Congress (1993) to present, and bill status and policy areas, 108th Congress (2003) to present. The Government Publishing Office publishes open text from the 113th Congress (2013) onward, which this site retrieves when a page is opened and shows on the page; earlier text is linked at its official source. The original document is always linked.

Biographical Directory of the US Congress All congresses Official member identities and official ID codes, with public-domain official portraits copied by the “unitedstates” volunteer project.

congress-legislators · the unitedstates project All congresses A public list that matches the different official ID codes for each member to one another. It is kept openly on GitHub and compiled from official sources.

U.S. Census Bureau · 119th Congressional District files 119th Congress, 2025 to 2027 The official match between 2020 ZIP code areas and the districts of the 119th Congress. A ZIP code that touches several districts is shown with all of them; the vote card asks you to choose, and never picks the largest overlap as if it were a match for your street address.

Presidential terms list · the unitedstates project 1789 to date Presidential terms, inauguration to inauguration, including terms begun by succession. Presidential service on a file page comes from here rather than from Voteview, which lists one president per Congress and so cannot show a term that ended partway through a Congress.

Bill explanations

Official summaries, with their version attached

Where available, the bill page reproduces a summary written by legislative analysts at the Congressional Research Service, retrieved from GovInfo\'s official bill status records. VoteFiles keeps the wording and the basic paragraph and list layout. We do not write or rewrite these summaries.

Each summary names the legislative action and date it covers, its version label from the Congressional Research Service, when it was last updated, and when we last checked the source. The latest action date sorts first; a later editorial correction to an older stage does not make that stage the latest bill. Summary stages do not always correspond to published text versions or to the text considered in a specific roll call.

A check older than seven days is marked as due for another look. If a check fails, we keep the earlier copy and show when it was made. A check that finds no summaries is shown differently from a summary we have not yet added. Neither means that no official bill text exists. Roll-call questions and vote records remain separate.

How CRS writes bill summaries ↗ · GovInfo bill status source ↗

Bills

How far a measure has got, and who decided that

A roll call only exists after a recorded vote, and most measures never get one. So the site also holds every measure the official record lists, from govinfo's bill status record for the 108th Congress on and from the Library of Congress bill list (Congress.gov) back to the 6th, and shows where each one has got to. Placing a measure on a step is the one thing we decide for ourselves, so the full list of steps is printed below with the current count beside each one. The label a bill page shows is the specific one from the record, such as Passed House; the step is the general stage that label belongs to. For 995,038 older measures the Library of Congress list gives only the latest action, so no step is assigned unless that action says the measure became law. The full Library of Congress record (sponsor, committee, every action) is being read for each of those older measures in turn: 144,990 of 1,155,853 so far. Early Congresses restarted bill numbers each session, used half numbers such as H.R. 189½, and Congress.gov lists each printed version of an early bill; those 929 entries each have their own page, labelled with the session, the ½ or the printed version. For 1873 to 1972, where Congress.gov lists no bills or only enacted ones, 898,387 bills come from the History of Bills and Resolutions printed in the bound Congressional Record, read by machine from GPO's scans on govinfo. Each such page links its printed page. A Congress is published only after a sample of its entries has been checked against the scans; a title that did not scan cleanly is withheld (642,290 so far), and 29,693 entries whose bill number the scan did not confirm are held back.

1,328,348measures on file 113Congresses with bills on file 26,366have become law

Step, highest first Measures there now

7. Law 26,366 The official record gives a public law number, or the latest action says the measure became public law. The law number is shown as the record prints it.

6. To the President 223 An action reads that the measure was presented to the President. A measure the President has vetoed sits on this step too, labeled Vetoed.

5. Passed both 2,384 Both a House passage action and a Senate passage action are on the record.

4. Passed a chamber 31,451 One chamber has a passage action and the other does not. The label names the chamber.

3. Out of committee 14,861 An action reads that the measure was reported, was ordered to be reported, or was placed on a calendar.

2. In committee 257,820 The record names at least one committee, and none of the later steps has happened.

1. Introduced 205 None of the later steps is on the record yet.

We check the steps from the top down, so a measure sits on the highest one the record supports. The counts on this page are current.

Breaking-topic verification

What “verified” means—and what it does not

A newsroom-selected topic is verified only after VoteFiles explicitly resolves federal, state, local, tribal-sovereignty, administrative, and international or treaty jurisdiction; records the authoritative systems and exact queries checked; opens every primary record used; searches for later or contrary evidence; discloses known gaps; and sets a recheck deadline no more than three days away.

VerifiedThe rules we followed, the scope, the list of sources, the list of official records we used, the reviewer, and the recheck date are all shown and complete. Verification is bounded by that disclosed scope and time.

No match foundNo matching record was found in the sources shown, using the searches shown, at the time shown. It never means that no record exists anywhere.

Coverage review requiredThe review has not been done, is not finished, is held up because an important source cannot be reached, or is past its recheck date. The public question may stay visible, but VoteFiles does not claim that no record exists and does not offer a share card.

Reporting versus proofNews reports, search results, AI summaries, and social posts can point us to leads. They do not replace a docket, order, opinion, statute, regulation, permit, agency decision, official agenda, minutes, contract, or other primary record.

Automated helpComputer programs may help us spot a topic, work out which governments and courts to check, watch a source, notice a changed record, and draft wording. They cannot make a topic verified on their own: the same checks of scope, official records, contrary evidence, freshness, and known gaps must still pass before anything changes on the public site.

Known coverage limitsSealed or unpublished material, documents available only through the federal courts\' paid PACER service, courts that do not publish reliable public lists, scattered state and local systems, sources we cannot reach, and cases where two people could be confused are all known limits. We note what is blocking us and how we plan to get around it; we never treat a missing source as proof that nothing happened.

86.8%of our sources are working

273areas fully covered

291areas partly covered

120areas not yet covered

1,151hhours since our oldest open gap

657changes to official sources, last 30 days

106topics rechecked, last 30 days

0important corrections, last 30 days

Current figures. “Fully covered” means every source we rely on for that area is working; an area where we can only reach an index, or only some of its sources, counts as partly covered.

Read the public list of corrections

Presidential documents

Where the executive orders come from

The numbered series is complete, with no missing numbers, from Executive Order 7532 (January 8, 1937) through Executive Order 14435, the latest signed (Oct 5, 2026). Coverage before 1937 is partial and we are still adding to it.

10,607executive orders 9,702numbered orders 40presidents covered Jan 22, 1791earliest signed Oct 5, 2026latest signed

Source Coverage

Federal Register EO 12890 (1993) to present Official details and full text for every executive order from EO 12890 (December 30, 1993) forward. We checked that the numbered series in this window is complete, with no missing numbers. Correction and reprint notices are added to the notes of the orders they correct instead of being counted as separate orders. 1,553 orders on file from this source · current count

National Archives, Executive Orders Disposition Tables 1937 to 2017 The official amend, revoke, and supersede record for EO 7532 (January 8, 1937) through the tables' stated end of January 19, 2017. A third of the year pages were missing from the National Archives website, so we first used saved copies of the same pages from the Internet Archive. We have stopped doing that: a year page that is not currently on archives.gov is now shown as unavailable instead of being copied. Where a year page has been removed entirely (1993's, as of this writing), the affected orders cite an official GovInfo record instead; see each order's page. Seven signing dates that were misprinted on the tables were corrected using each order's place in the numbered series, and each such order shows the original misprint in its notes. 5,390 orders on file from this source · current count

The American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara Pre-1937, partial An academic archive providing details and full text for pre-1937 orders where it holds them. Coverage before 1937 is partial; the project itself states its collection is complete from 1945. We are still adding these orders; the counts on this page are current. 3,664 orders on file from this source · current count

The courts

Where the docket comes from, and what it does not claim

Judicial opinions and case entries are works of the United States government and carry no copyright. Every line shown on The Docket is the court's own text: the caption as the clerk filed it, the clerk's own description of the latest entry, and, where a court has stated its decision, that sentence quoted from the court.

15,322cases published 87courts publishing their cases 63state a decision 0links to an executive order

Source Coverage

The federal courts' public case lists District courts and courts of appeals, current filings Each court publishes its own recent case entries. They are free and need no PACER account. Whether a court publishes at all is its own decision, and we check every day which courts do instead of assuming.

Supreme Court of the United States Decided cases of the current term, and each case's record The Court publishes its own opinions and its own case records. Its one-sentence statement of what it held is the Court's wording, shown word for word; this site never writes a summary of a holding.

State courts of last resort and intermediate appellate courts Each court's own published list of recent opinions and decisions Every state, D.C. and territorial appellate court whose own website publishes a readable opinion list is read from that court's own list, and every link goes to the court's own copy of the opinion. A court of last resort is kept whole, except family, juvenile, guardianship, commitment and discipline matters. From an intermediate court, only appeals between public bodies, between an organization and a public body, or on a named public-law subject (elections, ballot measures, redistricting, advisory opinions, statewide offices) are kept; prosecutions and other cases about one private person are not kept. A court whose website does not let us read it is listed as unavailable, never as quiet.

GovInfo, published federal court opinions (Government Publishing Office) Published written opinions, 2004 onward Cases from this collection that name the presidency, or that a state or commonwealth brought against a federal body, are on The Docket alongside the cases from the courts' own lists, newest first. They are also where our history from before we began reading those lists comes from. Where a case produced a published opinion, that opinion is read to find citations to executive orders and the sentence in which the court states its decision. Most cases never produce one.

Federal Register, agencies list The names of federal agencies Used to decide whether the party being sued is part of the federal government. Using the government's own list means the choice of which agencies count is not ours.

What this page will not tell you

It does not keep score. There are no win and loss records for any agency, administration, party or judge, and no case is described as a defeat or a victory. Where a court has stated its decision, that sentence is quoted and attributed to the court. Where it has not, the case shows nothing, which is the common outcome because most cases here are still being argued.

It does not count cases against a person. Where a case names the office of president, the file of the person who held that office is linked from the case and the case from the file, and that is all: no file carries a number of cases, because most suits naming an office say nothing about the person holding it.

Coverage is partial by nature. Publishing a public list of cases is each court's own choice, and 21 federal courts do not. Cases brought by a named individual are held on file and never published: most are Social Security disability appeals, which are public record but set out one person's medical history under their own name.

Documents behind PACER carry the judiciary's own per-page charge. This site never buys one. It saves the free case information and links to the court's own record.

Project 2025

Third-party Project 2025 trackers

This is one of several clearly attributed non-government layers on the site, alongside publisher headlines and named research compilations. Project 2025 reproduces the work of three outside organisations who each read the Heritage Foundation's Mandate for Leadership and recorded what has been done about it. They are independent of each other and of this site, they disagree about how many recommendations the document contains, and their totals are shown side by side rather than added together.

977rows, across three trackers 598carry a link you can open 3organisations doing the reading

Source Last updated at source

Project 2025 Executive Action Tracker 2026-02-11 Center for Progressive Reform & Governing for Impact. 532 proposals decomposed from 20 agency chapters of the Mandate, with the page each came from.

Project 2025 Observer 2026-10-19 project2025.observer (community-maintained). 321 objectives across 34 agencies, each linked to the specific order, rule or statute.

Project 2025 Tracker (education chapter) 2025-11-20 EducationCounsel. 124 recommendations from the education chapter only, graded on a five-point scale.

What that page does not claim

It shows correspondence, not causation. Much of what the document recommends restates positions that long predate it, so a recommendation and a matching government action appearing on the same row is not evidence that one caused the other.

The Mandate for Leadership is copyrighted by the Heritage Foundation. The page links to their own copy of it and reproduces none of its text: every recommendation shown is written in our words, not theirs.

Coverage is uneven and the page says where. Domestic administrative action is tracked closely; recommendations needing legislation, and the foreign policy and defense chapters, are barely tracked by any of these three.

Official and derived

What is the record and what is computed from it

For the core vote and bill archive, this table distinguishes source-attributed record fields from fields computed or classified from them. Some fields reach VoteFiles through named third-party compilations; other parts of the site separately identify attributed third-party compilations, publisher reporting, and their coverage limits.

Record fields · source-attributed

Member-level vote positions through Voteview’s compilation of congressional roll calls

Vote tallies: yea, nay, present, not voting

Vote dates

Bill numbers

Questions and descriptions

Official results, wherever the record publishes one

Member identities and party affiliations from cited official records and source crosswalks

ZIP-area and congressional-district relationships

Bill text, from the official GPO XML

Worked out by us

Type Sorted from the official question, description, and bill number: Passage, Amendment, Cloture, Nomination, Treaty, Veto override, Impeachment, Procedural, Resolution, or Bill action.

Topic A keyword classification of the official vote descriptions. Topic chips on measure pages note that the tag is derived.

Outcome Where the record publishes an official result, that result appears verbatim. Where it does not, the outcome is the majority side of the tally, with a two-thirds test applied to treaties, veto overrides, and impeachment votes, and the page labels it derived.

Recorded-vote claim finding The Claim vs. Record pilot compares the vote you pick with the vote we have on file for one exact roll call. If they match, the claim is supported; if the record shows a different vote, it is contradicted; if we have no dated vote on file, it is not established. The comparison never guesses at general support, motive or the effect of a policy.

Attendance The share of a member's recorded roll calls where they voted or answered present.

ZIP vote card The ZIP code is matched to the Census Bureau's ZIP code area file for the sitting Congress. A ZIP code area is a map shape and is not a promise that every mailing address with those digits is in one district. When the area touches several districts, every possible district is shown and you choose; we do not guess from land area.

Party loyalty The share of a member's yea and nay votes cast with their own party's majority, counting only votes where the party had a majority side; ties are excluded.

Ideology A score for where a member falls politically (DW-NOMINATE), worked out by Voteview from the full voting record, not by us. Shown with credit on member pages.

Order status (REVOKED, AMENDED) Worked out by matching the wording of the National Archives notes on what happened to each order. The tables cover January 8, 1937 to January 19, 2017; orders outside that window show no status rather than a clean bill.

President attribution, 1937 to 1993 Derived from each order's signing date checked against presidential term dates, and checked against the National Archives' published list of each president's order numbers, which it matches exactly.

Series position fixes A handful of records with no number, or a misprinted one, were placed using their position in the numbered series, and each says so in its notes.

Which court cases are shown A case is kept only where the case title names a federal agency or office as the party being sued, matched against the Federal Register's own list of agencies. Everything else the courts publish is counted and discarded. Roughly 6 in every 100 cases the courts list are kept.

Who brought a case Read from the case title: a state, an organization, or an individual. Deciding that "Sierra Club" is an organization and a surname is a person is our reading of the title, not the court's. Cases brought by a named individual are not published at all.

How far a bill has got A measure is placed on one of seven steps by matching the phrases the clerk recorded in its official list of actions. The full list of steps, and how many measures are on each, is further down this page. A step says how far a measure has got, never whether that is good, and nothing here predicts whether a bill will pass.

How much a measure is being argued about A count of public posts mentioning that measure, taken from one social media site over a set period. No post, user name, author or link is kept, and nothing says which side the posts took. Method further down this page.

How often a member is looked up The daily count of readers opening that member's Wikipedia article, as Wikimedia publishes it. The typical day, the busiest day, and the "most since" line are worked out by us from those daily counts. Method further down this page.

Docket entry dates Taken from the court, except where the court states a date that cannot be real. Several courts mistakenly stamp entries with the year 3926; those entries are shown without a date rather than allowed to sort to the top of every list.

Which politician a case appears under For presidents, only a case title that names the office in words ("President of the United States") is linked to the person who held that office on the earliest date the record shows the case before the court. For senators and representatives, the public case title must explicitly name both the person and the federal office, that name must identify exactly one member serving in that chamber on the record date, and every other safety check for court records must pass. We are applying the same principle step by step to verified state, territorial, and local officials. So far we use complete, reviewed lists of governors and the D.C. mayor, partial lists of attorneys general and other statewide officials that we confirmed from a second source, and official rosters from 17 state legislatures; the live lookup shows the counts we actually have. For most newly added officials we know who they are but not yet the exact dates they served, and we need a separate government record for those dates before we can match them to court cases. A name or surname on its own is never used. Personal, campaign, business, family, and individual-capacity matters are excluded. A link is published only for a court whose public case list or published opinions let us follow later action, and cases are listed but never added up. An empty section is not a claim that no case exists.

Citations

Every measure page cites its official record

Each measure page carries a box titled “The official record” that links the government source for that vote:

The official record

Senate votes link their Senate.gov roll-call record, 1989 (101st Congress) to present
House votes link their House Clerk roll-call record, 1990 to present
Bills link their Congress.gov page, 1973 (93rd Congress) to present
Bill text comes from the official GovInfo (GPO) record, 1993 (103rd Congress) to present; shown inline from 2013 (113th Congress), linked at the source before that
Executive orders link their Federal Register document, their National Archives disposition entry, or their American Presidency Project page, whichever the record provides
Campaign Money reads the Federal Election Commission's public data files weekly: candidate and committee registrations, candidate-committee links and the FEC's all-candidates financial summaries for the 2023–2024 and 2025–2026 cycles, and itemized contributions from individuals to candidates' campaign committees for 2025–2026. Each figure carries the FEC's own dates and links to the FEC record or filing. Registration with the FEC does not mean a candidate is on the ballot, contributor records are shown as filed with city and state only, and none of them can be downloaded in bulk
The Official Record Wire lists new documents from the Federal Register, the White House, the House Clerk, the Senate, GovInfo, and the Supreme Court as Vote Files first sees them, each linked to its publisher and with the status of our latest check of each source shown
Watchdog and scorekeeper reports are read from Oversight.gov (Inspector General reports for federal offices, as listed by CIGIE), the GAO reports list (gao.gov), the CBO publications list (cbo.gov) and Congress.gov (Congressional Research Service reports). Titles, dates and report numbers are the publishers' own; a report is tied to a bill only where CBO names the bill in its estimate's title or CRS lists it among related materials
Congressional stock trades and financial disclosures are not copied or republished by Vote Files. Federal law limits the use of these reports (5 U.S.C. 13107(c)), so we link to the official search pages of the Clerk of the House (disclosures-clerk.house.gov) and the Secretary of the Senate (efdsearch.senate.gov)
Lobbying filings (registrations, quarterly reports and contribution reports) are read from LDA.gov, published by the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House, exactly as filed, each linked to the official filing. Senate Office of Public Records cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after the data have been retrieved from LDA.gov. Foreign-agent records are read from the Department of Justice foreign-agent filing system, each linked to the filed document

Votes before those windows are cited to the printed Journals of the House and Senate, as compiled by Voteview. Anyone who contests a number on this site can follow the link and check the official record directly.

Claim vs. Record

A comparison of one assertion with one exact recorded vote

The first Claim vs. Record pilot is intentionally narrower than a general fact-check. A reader identifies one member, Congress, chamber and roll-call number, then chooses YEA, NAY, PRESENT or NOT VOTING. The checker looks up the vote we have on file for that exact roll call and makes one simple comparison.

Possible findings

Supported by the record means the vote claimed exactly matches the vote on file.
Contradicted by the record means a different vote is on file.
Not established by this record means we have no vote on file for that member on that roll call. It does not mean the claim is false.

What is not inferred

A procedural vote is not described as general support for or opposition to a bill.
We do not judge motive, intent, the effect of a policy, an article, a quotation or who said something.
Your entry is not saved, and no shareable result is created.

For Senate votes from 1989 onward and House votes from 1990 onward, the result links the chamber\'s own roll-call page. Earlier votes by individual members come from Voteview\'s collection of the official House and Senate Journals and are labeled as historical records. Every result also links to the full Vote Files roll-call page so the exact question, tally and surrounding votes can be read in context. Open Claim vs. Record →

The news layer

Headlines from across the spectrum, and nothing written by us

Some pages carry news coverage alongside the record. The rule governing it is short: this site reproduces what an outlet published and links to it, and writes nothing of its own. The value is in the juxtaposition, not in our opinion of it.

What is stored A headline exactly as the outlet published it, the outlet's name, the publication date, and a link to the original article. We do not keep the outlet's summary, and we never copy or keep the text of articles.

What is displayed The same four things, always together. A headline never appears without the outlet that wrote it, the date it ran, and a link to the original.

What is never done to outlet material Vote Files does not rewrite, shorten, paraphrase, or summarize an outlet headline. Outlet wording remains attributed and linked to its publisher. Showing an item is not agreement with it.

Where computer matching is used A computer program groups outlet items that cover the same story and works out which public file an item may refer to. It can help rank how much attention a story is getting, but it does not rewrite an outlet's words. When a match is uncertain, we do not show it.

How “Trending now” is ranked The Trending now section ranks stories by how fast attention is growing, never by accuracy, and never rates an outlet. For each source we compare the most recent period with the period before it: the last 6 hours against the 42 hours before for news outlets, the last hour against the 5 hours before for Bluesky, and yesterday against the 7 days before for Wikipedia. A faster rise earns a higher score, up to a limit. The sources count in this proportion: news outlets we monitor 40 points, worldwide news article volume (from the GDELT project) 25, Bluesky public post counts 20, and Wikipedia readers of a politician's page 15. A story appears only if it has at least 3 headlines from at least 2 outlets, coverage from the outlets we monitor is speeding up, and its score is at least 30 out of 100. Social media posts are counted, never quoted or linked.

Vote Files newsroom copy Breaking-topic pages with their own label contain wording written by Vote Files: a public question, background, and a limited account of what the official records we picked support. Computer programs, including AI language tools, may help us find topics, plan research, and draft. News reports, search results, computer-written text, and social media posts remain leads rather than proof. A topic is shown as verified only when its checks of scope, official records, contrary records, later action, identity, known gaps, and freshness all pass.

Matching to a measure An article is attached to a bill only when the bill's official name, taken from the government's own bill status record, appears in the headline or clip, and only when that name identifies exactly one measure. Bills whose short titles are shared by several measures are refused, as are titles that reach a bill by amendment rather than naming it.

Matching to a member An article is attached to a sitting member only when the name in the headline or clip identifies exactly one person out of every member this archive holds, past or present, and that person currently serves. A surname on its own is never enough: five sitting members are named Johnson and five are named Smith. When a name is shared, the article must also name the state, and where that still leaves a choice, nothing is attached.

Nicknames The press uses names the government record does not carry, so a short published list matches a few of them to the official entry: AOC to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders to the Bernard Sanders of the record. Every entry is on a short published list, each is checked against our records and refused unless it identifies exactly one sitting member, and matches made this way are kept separate from matches made on the official name. Nicknames used as commentary rather than as names are not carried.

When in doubt, nothing is shown Every uncertain match is dropped rather than guessed at, and we keep a record of each rejection and its reason so we can measure how often we miss instead of assuming. An article that is not shown is invisible. An article shown against the wrong member is a false accusation. The site is built to prefer the first mistake to the second.

Outlet positions

Who says these outlets lean this way

We do. There is no third-party rating behind these positions and no panel. Each outlet is placed once, by hand, and the placement describes that outlet's editorial orientation and its audience. It says nothing about whether the outlet is accurate, honest or reliable, because this site does not rate the credibility of news organizations and has no business doing so.

Positions are assigned to the outlet, never to the article. Judging each article's slant would mean passing judgment on writing we did not read closely and cannot defend, which is exactly the kind of claim this site refuses to make. Grouping by outlet keeps every judgment in one list anyone can check, published below.

These are judgment calls and reasonable people will disagree with some of them. Coverage Lens now measures how many of the outlets we monitor, and how many positions, covered the same story, but it does not quietly turn that count into a new political rating. Which outlets we monitor, how much they publish and how closely we require stories to match can all affect the count. The positions below therefore remain our own stated judgments, while the story-by-story evidence is published separately for readers to look at. Open Coverage Lens → Open the source directory, with every source's own channels →

We monitor 382 sources, grouped below by kind: newsrooms, independent newsrooms, individual commentators, shows, and law, policy and international desks. A commentator is placed the same way an outlet is, by the orientation of the voice and its audience.

Newsrooms

Left of center

ABC News Politics

Democracy Now!

HuffPost Politics

Inside Climate News

In These Times

Jacobin

Los Angeles Times Politics

Ms. Magazine

OregonLive Politics

Politico

ProPublica

Salon

Slate News & Politics

The 19th

The American Prospect

The Atlantic Politics

The Daily Beast

The Intercept

The Nation

The New Republic

Vox

Washington Post Politics

Center

AL.com Politics

Bloomberg Government

Bloomberg Politics

Breaking Defense

Cleveland.com Politics

CNBC Politics

Courthouse News Service

Defense News

Defense One

Deseret News

Federal News Network

Foreign Policy

Military Times

NBC News Politics

NewsNation

Nextgov/FCW

NJ.com Politics

PBS NewsHour Politics

RealClearWorld

Roll Call

Route Fifty

Semafor

Stateline

Task & Purpose

The Conversation US Politics

The Economist US

The Hill

The Week Politics

Right of center

Breitbart

National Review

One America News Network

RealClearPolitics

RedState

The Daily Caller

The Epoch Times (US)

The Washington Times

Washington Free Beacon

Independent newsrooms

Left of center

Aaron Rupar

Alabama Reflector

Alaska Beacon

AlterNet

Arizona Mirror

Arkansas Advocate

Bolts

Capital and Main

Capital B News

Chalkbeat

Colorado Newsline

Crooks and Liars

CT Mirror

Current Affairs

Daily Kos

Defector

Drop Site News

Florida Phoenix

Georgia Recorder

Heather Cox Richardson

Honolulu Civil Beat

Idaho Capital Sun

Indiana Capital Chronicle

Iowa Capital Dispatch

Jessica Craven

Kansas Reflector

Ken Klippenstein

Kentucky Lantern

KFF Health News

Louisiana Illuminator

Maine Morning Star

Mark Jacob

Maryland Matters

Media Matters

Michigan Advance

Minnesota Reformer

Mississippi Today

Missouri Independent

Native News Online

NC Newsline

Nebraska Examiner

Nevada Current

New Hampshire Bulletin

New Jersey Monitor

Ohio Capital Journal

Oklahoma Voice

Oregon Capital Chronicle

Palmer Report

Parker Molloy

Pennsylvania Capital-Star

Popular Information (Judd Legum)

Raw Story

Rewire News Group

Sludge

Source NM

South Carolina Daily Gazette

South Dakota Searchlight

Talking Points Memo

Tennessee Lookout

Texas Observer

The Appeal

The Argument

The Bulwark

The Contrarian

The Daily Poster

The Forward

The Lever

The Markup

The Marshall Project

The Root

Truthout

Utah News Dispatch

Virginia Mercury

VTDigger

Washington Monthly

Washington State Standard

West Virginia Watch

Wisconsin Examiner

Wonkette

Zeteo (Mehdi Hasan)

Center

Bridge Michigan

CalMatters

Capitol News Illinois

Christianity Today

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Persuasion (Yascha Mounk)

Political Wire

Puck

Religion News Service

spiked

STAT

Tangle (Isaac Saul)

The Free Press

UnHerd

Votebeat

VoteHub

Right of center

Bearing Arms

Commentary Magazine

Conservative Review

First Things

Hot Air

Independent Journal Review

JNS

Libs of TikTok

LifeSiteNews

Not the Bee

PJ Media

RealClearInvestigations

Reason

Revolver News

The Algemeiner

The American Conservative

The Babylon Bee

The Blaze

The College Fix

The Conservative Treehouse

The Daily Signal

The Daily Wire

The Federalist

The Gateway Pundit

The Imaginative Conservative

The National Pulse

Townhall (feed)

Twitchy

WND

Commentators and columnists

Left of center

Aaron Parnas

Adam Kinzinger (The Kinzinger Report)

Bette Midler

Bill Kristol

Brian Beutler (Off Message)

Charlie Sykes (The Bulwark)

Chris Hayes

Dan Pfeiffer (The Message Box)

Dan Rather (Steady)

David Roberts (Volts)

Eric Garland

Freddie deBoer

G. Elliott Morris (Strength in Numbers)

George Takei

Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

Hasan Piker (HasanAbi)

Hopium Chronicles (Simon Rosenberg)

Jamelle Bouie

Jay Kuo (Status Kuo)

Jen Psaki

Jim Acosta

Joe Walsh (The Social Contract)

Katie Couric

Keith Olbermann

Lawyers, Guns and Money

Lucian Truscott

Mark Hamill

Mary Trump

Matt Yglesias (Slow Boring)

Mehdi Hasan

Michael Cohen (Mea Culpa)

Molly Jong-Fast

Noah Smith (Noahpinion)

Paul Krugman

Robert Hubbell (Todays Edition)

Robert Reich

Ruth Ben-Ghiat (Lucid)

Sam Stein

Sarah Kendzior

Stephen King

Thomas Zimmer (Democracy Americana)

Thom Hartmann

Tim Miller (The Next Level)

Timothy Snyder (Thinking about...)

Wajahat Ali (Left Reckoning)

Center

Andrew Sullivan (The Weekly Dish)

Anne Applebaum

Astral Codex Ten

Bari Weiss

David Frum

Jesse Singal

Josh Barro (Very Serious)

Mark Halperin (2WAY)

Michael Shellenberger (Public)

Nate Silver (Silver Bulletin)

Rick Wilson

Stratechery (Ben Thompson)

Tom Nichols

Right of center

Alex Berenson (Unreported Truths)

Ann Coulter (Unsafe)

Benny Johnson

Bill O'Reilly

Buck Sexton

Candace Owens

Christopher Rufo (Substack)

Clay Travis

Dana Loesch (The Dana Show)

Glenn Beck

Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Loury

Hugh Hewitt

Instapundit

Jack Posobiec

Jordan Schachtel (The Dossier)

Liz Wheeler

Marginal Revolution

Mark Levin

Mark Steyn

Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

Matt Walsh

Megyn Kelly

Richard Hanania (Richard Hanania's Newsletter)

Riley Gaines

Rod Dreher (Substack)

Sasha Stone

Sean Hannity

Sharyl Attkisson

Tomi Lahren

Victor Davis Hanson

Elected officials and politicians

Left of center

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Bernie Sanders

Chris Murphy

Cory Booker

Elizabeth Warren

Gavin Newsom

Jasmine Crockett

Pete Buttigieg

Podcasts and shows

Left of center

#SistersInLaw (Barbara McQuade, Joyce Vance and co-hosts)

Breaking News from Pod Save America

Brian Tyler Cohen

Majority Report

Pod Save America

The Bulwark Daily

The David Pakman Show

The MeidasTouch Podcast

The Rachel Maddow Show Podcast

The Young Turks

Right of center

Allie Beth Stuckey (Relatable)

Ben Ferguson (The Ben Ferguson Podcast)

Ben Shapiro (Titans on Tomorrow)

Dan O'Donnell (The Dan O'Donnell Show)

Eric Metaxas (The Eric Metaxas Show)

Guy Benson (The Guy Benson Show)

Hillsdale Dialogues

Hugh Hewitt (The Hugh Hewitt Show)

Jimmy Failla (Fox Across America)

John Solomon (John Solomon Reports)

Katie Miller (The Katie Miller Podcast)

Kirk Cameron (The Kirk Cameron Show)

Larry Elder (The Larry Elder Show)

Lars Larson (The Lars Larson Show)

Mark Simone (The Mark Simone Show)

Newt Gingrich (Newt's World)

Pat Gray (Pat Gray Unleashed)

Patrick Bet-David

Sharyl Attkisson (Full Measure After Hours)

Steve Bannon (Bannon's War Room)

Ted Cruz (Verdict with Ted Cruz)

The Charlie Kirk Show

The Daily Signal Podcast

The Dan Bongino Show

The Fifth Column

The Five (Fox News)

The Great America Show

The Reason Roundtable

The Tucker Carlson Show

Tim Pool

Todd Starnes (ToddCast)

Tom Woods (The Tom Woods Show)

Townhall Review

Wayne Allyn Root (War Zone)

Law and courts

Left of center

ACLU

American Constitution Society

Andrew Weissmann

Balkinization

Balls and Strikes

Campaign Legal Center

Democracy Docket

Election Law Blog (Rick Hasen)

Glenn Kirschner

Joyce Vance

Just Security

Protect Democracy

Steve Vladeck (One First)

Strict Scrutiny

Center

Above the Law

SCOTUSblog

Right of center

Judicial Watch

Law and Liberty

Legal Insurrection

Pacific Legal Foundation

The Volokh Conspiracy

Policy, polling and fact-checking

Left of center

Brennan Center

Data for Progress

Institute for Policy Studies

Roosevelt Institute

The Century Foundation

Center

Ballotpedia News

Bipartisan Policy Center

FactCheck.org

GovTrack Insider

KFF

Niskanen Center

Pew Research Center

RAND Corporation (news)

RealClearPolicy

Snopes

Right of center

American Enterprise Institute

Capital Research Center

Claremont Review of Books

Discovery Institute

Hillsdale College Imprimis

Hudson Institute

Independent Women's Forum

Mackinac Center

Pacific Research Institute

Texas Public Policy Foundation

The American Mind

The Heartland Institute

International outlets

Left of center

Al Jazeera

The Independent US Politics

Center

ABC Australia World

DW News

Euronews

France 24

Sky News US

South China Morning Post World

The Japan Times

Every outlet above is read from its own published headline list. An outlet that stops giving us a headline, a link or a date is dropped rather than patched around.

Attention

Counting the argument without repeating any of it

Some measures carry a count of how much they are being posted about. The rule is the opposite of the news layer's: the news layer reproduces a headline and links to it, and this counts posts and stores none of them. Nothing a member of the public wrote about a member of Congress appears anywhere on this site.

65measures counted 763counts on file 3days covered by each count 91counts marked "at least"

Source Public search, free, no account needed

Bluesky The only social media site we use. It offers a public search anyone can use without logging in, which means you can run the same search we ran and see the same posts. Two other platforms were considered and are not used. Reddit's free access is limited to non-commercial projects, and X charges for access and sets conditions on how posts may be displayed.

What is counted For a measure the site is already showing, the number of Bluesky posts that cite it, the number of different accounts those posts came from, and the replies, quotes, reposts and likes those posts carry.

What is never stored No post text. No handle. No author identifier. No link to a post. Our records have no place to keep any of them, so they cannot be stored by accident. We count the different accounts while we read the results and then discard the account names.

Why a count and not a quote An outlet headline has a newsroom standing behind it, which is why the news layer reproduces headlines and links to them. A stranger's post about a named member has nobody standing behind it, and reprinting one on that member's file would be this site republishing an unchecked allegation. A count cannot do that.

What is searched The measure's citation in both the forms people write it, "H.R. 1" and "HR 1", plus the measure's short title, and the title only where that title names this measure and no other. That is the same rule we use when matching news stories: "SAVE America Act" is the short title of three different measures of this Congress, so counting posts about all three against one of them would be a fabricated number. The exact words we searched for are saved beside every count so it can be checked.

Why some counts say "at least" The search shows the first page of results to anyone but does not allow a second page, so the most we can count for any one search is 100 posts. When a search fills its page, the real number is higher than the one we have, so the page says "at least" instead of presenting a capped count as a total.

What it is not It is not approval, opposition or support, and no page here says which side the posts took, because that is not counted or kept. It is a measure of how much a measure is being argued about, and nothing else.

Latest count taken Oct 19, 2026. The counts on this page are current.

Lookups

When the public went looking, and what that does not mean

A member page shows how often that member's Wikipedia article was read, day by day. It earns a place there for one reason: it says when people went looking, and the voting record underneath says what they found. It is a count of readers and nothing more, and the section below sets out exactly how it is taken so that a reader can check it or dispute it.

553members on file 1,881,478daily counts Jul 1, 2015earliest day held Oct 15, 2026latest day held

Source Coverage

Wikimedia, readers per article July 2015 to present Wikimedia's own published count of how many readers opened an article each day, free to anyone. July 2015 is the earliest day it holds, which is why nothing here reaches further back.

Wikidata, Biographical Directory ID How members are matched This ID from the Biographical Directory of the US Congress is what connects a member\'s page to a Wikipedia article, instead of matching on a name.

What is counted The number of times a member's English Wikipedia article was opened by a reader on a given day, as Wikimedia publishes it. Wikimedia removes traffic from automated programs before it publishes the counts; we do not filter anything ourselves.

How a member is matched to an article By official ID code, never by name. Wikidata, the public database behind Wikipedia, records each person's Biographical Directory ID, and the article is whichever one that ID points to. We did not use names because we store them surname first with nicknames in brackets while Wikipedia uses other ways of telling people apart, and matching on a name puts the wrong person on a page. One member of the sitting Congress has no such ID on file and so has no lookup counts here.

What the file shows The last 30 days as daily bars, the busiest day in that window, the typical day, and the window total. The typical day is the middle day rather than the average, because a single day of heavy reading drags an average away from what an ordinary day looks like.

The "most since" line Where it appears, it means exactly what it says: the busiest day in the window is the busiest since that date, checked against every day on file for that member back to July 2015. It is withheld in three cases. The peak has to be at least three times that member's own typical day, so an ordinary week does not get announced. The previous busier day has to be at least 180 days back, so the line is not "the most since last Tuesday". And a member whose article is under a year old cannot support "since" anything. Without those three tests the line appeared for half of the members we tried it on.

What it is not It is not approval, support, favourability or importance, and it is not a poll. It records that people went and read about a member on a day, which is why it sits above that member's voting record rather than instead of it. Reading about someone is not agreement with them.

Why we explain this at such length

A daily line next to a politician's name invites being read as a popularity score, and it is not one. A member can be looked up because they were named to a ticket, because they lost a primary, or because they died. The count is the same shape in every case, and this site does not say which it was.

Newsroom data

Verified voting deadlines, with the same rule everywhere

The 2026 voting deadlines on the Midterm Voting Center are also available for other websites and programs to use: as free data, as a news-reader feed of changes, and as a card you can place on a page. All three show a date only while it is verified against a saved copy of the official source and has been rechecked for later court orders within the past seven days. Anything else is labeled not yet verified, with a link to the official election office. The terms, details, how current the data is, and how to credit us are on the newsroom data page.

Corrections

When the record changes, the archive follows

The House and Senate occasionally correct a vote after the fact. We update the archive from the sources above and mark every page with the date of its data, currently October 19, 2026. If you find a discrepancy between this site and the official record, report it to our corrections desk. We check the official source and correct the archive.

The same desk handles the news section. A headline attached to the wrong measure, or a verified publisher removal request, is reviewed through the corrections desk before anything changes on the site. The full terms are on the terms page.

Legal notes

Where this site stands

Public domain Works of the United States government are public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. Roll-call records, tallies, and bill texts are works of the United States government.

Headlines belong to their outlets Headlines shown on this site are the property of the outlets that published them, are reproduced exactly as published with attribution and a link to the original, and are shown without endorsement. A publisher can use the headline-or-outlet request category on our support page to ask for removal; we review who is asking and what they are asking for before making any change.

Perspective, not credibility Where this site places an outlet on the spectrum, it describes that outlet's editorial orientation. It is not a statement about whether the outlet is accurate, honest or reliable. This site does not rate the credibility of any news organization.

Public record The votes, tallies, and texts reproduced on this site are facts of the public record, drawn from the official sources listed above.

Independent This site is independent and nonpartisan. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any government body.

Not legal advice Nothing on this site is legal advice.

No official seals Official seals are not used anywhere on this site.