Voter resources for tracking legislation

1Primary sources

A primary source publishes the record itself rather than a summary of it. For federal legislation there is one, maintained by the legislature.

Congress.gov

The official website of the United States Congress, maintained by the Library of Congress. Each bill page lists the measure’s actions and any roll-call votes taken on it; each vote page names the bill and records every member’s position. It is the authoritative record against which other sites are checked.

2Congressional trackers

Independent sites that republish the federal record in a more navigable form, usually adding search, member histories and notifications.

BallotWatch

Looks up a reader’s senators and representative, then presents their congressional voting records alongside the bills themselves, with explanations linked back to the source. Also carries member profiles and campaign finance context drawn from public records.

GovTrack

Covers bills and roll-call votes alongside member pages carrying individual voting histories, and offers email alerts when a tracked bill comes up for a vote.

watch.vote

Presents bills and member voting records drawn from the Congress.gov application programming interface.

3State legislatures

State and local bodies decide a large share of the matters that reach an individual directly, and their records are more fragmented than the federal one. Sites in this category consolidate them.

ThePolitibase

Covers Congress together with all fifty state legislatures, presenting votes and the bills they belong to in a single place.

4Analysis and scoring

These resources place an interpretive layer over the record, grouping votes by subject or positioning members on a scale. The underlying votes remain verifiable against a primary source, but the grouping and the scores are editorial judgements.

Voteview

Holds every congressional roll call since 1789, each mapped to its bill and placed on a common ideological scale, which allows positions to be compared across long periods rather than within a single session.

US PoliTrack

Sorts votes into issue areas and scores members against them.

5Verifying a vote

A claim about how a representative voted can be checked in three steps, and the check does not depend on trusting the site that made the claim. Find the bill by number or title on a primary source. Open the roll call attached to it, which records the date, the question put to the chamber and every member's position. Read the question, because a vote is cast on a specific motion rather than on a bill in the abstract, and a vote against a procedural motion is not the same as a vote against the measure.

Where an interpretive site and a primary source disagree, the primary source governs.

6About this page

PoliticsLens was a planned tool for surfacing legislation relevant to an individual reader, beginning with local bodies and scaling to federal. Development was stopped in September 2026, before any application code was written, on the finding that the resources listed above already serve the purpose, several of them across all fifty state legislatures. BallotWatch in particular carries much of what the tool was intended to do.